Archive Shotgun media for old projects

[RobertH]

Hey there,

We’re looking to move a project and need to reduce the overall size of the content that needs to be transferred. I wanted to know if there was a way that we could remove/archive the media for old projects as these take up the lion’s share of space?

I am aware of the archive option on the drop-down (https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/hc/en-us/articles/219030668-Archiving-Projects) but was unclear as to what exactly it does.

Or is this something SHOTGUN would do?

I appreciate any help.

Regards
Robert

[bouchep]

Hi @RobertH, and welcome to the Shotgun community.

The Shotgun web application never removes any media. When you send something to the trash, we mark it as retired, but don’t delete it should you want to move it out of the trash. In the case of archived projects, that’s even less “destructive” than the trash as it just marks the project, and any data from archived projects are then excluded from searches by default.

Based on your question, I’m going to assume your Shotgun is locally installed on-prem and not hosted. If that is the case, you’ve got a lot more latitude towards managing your media than a hosted solution that we manage (and you probably don’t have to worry about media space on hosted).

If my assumption is correct, this reply should help you understand the pattern of paths where media is stored.

Docker Container -- Querying files associated to entity

Hi @StarkRavenSimone, In order to answer your question I’ll use a Version as an example. I’ll also be overly descriptive for the benefit of the wider community. Fundamentally, most if not all files uploaded to Shotgun are stored as a File entity (the notable exception being thumbnails). The File entity in scripting terms is called Attachment and I’ll use that term in the rest of this response. If you query a Version and ask for the fields that hold media, e.g. sg_uploaded_media you’ll get Att…

Let me know if my assumption was wrong or if you have additional questions.

[RobertH]

Thanks for the reply,

I believer our SG is hosted not “on-prem” what difference does that make?

I’m new to this so please excuse any questions that may appear naive.

Regards
Robert

[tom-fw]

Hey @bouchep

Thanks for getting back to us the first time, although we’re just wondering if you’d been able to follow up on this?

The full situation that we’ve asked Robert to take a look at is to remove the media that is stored by SG for some of our projects. We don’t want to remove the PublishedFile or Version entities in SG themselves, we still need that data, but we want to make sure that the thumbnails (and any other media) are remove from “the back end”.

We’re doing this because we’re transferring the site in question to use a different “Storage location for uploaded files” (we’re moving from the Europe location to US. Oregon) in the shotgun settings and we don’t want it to have to re-transcode a load of files that we don’t actually need in the new SG storage location.

Hopefully that provides a bit more context to what it is we’re trying to do, so if you have any advice about how we go about doing this we’d love to hear from you ASAP as this is becoming a time sensitive matter.

Thanks

Tom

[bouchep]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the clarifications. This makes the situation much clearer.

Because of the specifics of your situation and the possible need to exchange sensitive information this conversation had been moved to a support ticket (you’re CC’d on it) where we’ll be continuing the conversation.