Moving content with sweeps

Use a job sweep or sweep policy to move content for large numbers of documents and annotations from one storage area to another.

Reasons to move content between storage areas are as follows:

  • To retire an obsolete storage device by moving all the content to a replacement device.
  • To archive content by moving it from a primary storage device to an archival device or lower-cost storage.
  • To move federated content from the source repository to a FileNet® P8 device.
  • To move content to fixed storage for regulatory purposes.
  • To change how existing content is stored. For example, configuring a storage area to encrypt content has no effect on the existing stored content. But moving the content to another storage area that is already configured for encryption encrypts the existing content.

Key considerations in creating a move-content sweep are as follows:

  • Document or Annotation content to be moved.
  • Destination storage areas. The storage policy for a sweep determines the set of storage areas that are eligible as destinations for the moved content. If one storage area has a status of OPEN, that area is chosen as the destination storage area. If there are multiple storage areas with a status of OPEN, one of the storage areas is chosen at random.
  • Whether to disable replication on Document or Annotation content, if any. For replicated content that is moved, the sweep can permanently disable the replication after it moves the content. This property supports the use case of decommissioning an external repository that is no longer needed. Any future updates to the content are no longer replicated to or from the external repository.
  • Updating Storage Policy. By default, in a move-content sweep, the value of the Storage Policy property is retained at the document level. This means that even after a move, a check-out reservation of the document is still assigned to the original storage area. For some move sweeps, however, the current storage location is no longer relevant, such as when you are removing a storage location from your environment. In such cases, you can apply the Update storage policy option when you create a move-content sweep job. This changes the Storage Policy for all the documents that are affected by the move to the new storage location.

(V5.5.9 and later) Skip deleting content from source storage area for move content

By default, after the content is moved to the destination storage area, the original content is deleted from the source storage area. A check is also done before the move content operation to decide whether the content can be deleted from the source storage. A move content operation does not start if the content cannot be deleted from the source storage area.

In certain situations, you might want to allow move content to skip the deletion of the content from the source storage area. For example,
  • The source storage area is a fixed content storage area in aligned mode and the content is under retention. In this case, the normal move content request is rejected because the content cannot be deleted from source storage area.
  • When you perform a large content migration project to the new storage area and retire the old storage device, you might plan to manually destroy all the content in the old storage device. In this case, skipping deletion improves the overall migration performance because the deletion check and the deletion step are both skipped in the process.
To do this, you need to define a JVM configuration parameter Content.Move.SkipDelete_{source storage area object id} and set it to true. You can find the object id of the source storage area from ACCE. For example, if you set Content.Move.SkipDelete_{55597BED-3CDD-CB1C-8420-6E597FE00000} to true, any move content operation from the source storage area with the object id {55597BED-3CDD-CB1C-8420-6E597FE00000} is skipped.
Note: When the configuration parameter is applied, after move content, the original content stays in the source storage device. However, it cannot be retrieved or deleted from Content Platform Engine anymore. You need to manually delete the content in the source storage device. It is not the case that the content is stored in both storage areas after move content. For the Content Engine platform, the content is only stored and retrievable from the destination storage area after move content.

This configuration parameter applies to all types of storage areas including fixed content storage area. It also applies to all move content operations from the specified source storage area, including bulk move content sweep job, move content policy sweep and moving content by using API calls.