Best Practices for Volume Administration
Volume size
You will need to monitor the size of your volumes to make sure that they do not grow too large. If a volume grows too large for the hard drive on which it is stored, users will no longer be able to add documents, pages, and certain other information to that document. Furthermore, if you are using backup or archival media, you will want to ensure that the volume does not become too big to back up on that media.
For these reasons, you should consider limiting the size a volume can grow to. The easiest way to do so is through the Size limit option, which limits volumes to an administrator-defined size, specified in megabytes (MB). Although this will limit your volumes from growing significantly beyond the specified size limit, it will not create a new volume when the current one gets full. As a result, users will receive an error when adding content to that volume. To avoid this situation, you should take advantage of logical volumes. See the Volumes section for more information.
Each of these factors plays a role in establishing the usability, reliability, and performance of storing data in Laserfiche volumes.
Naming Convention
The name assigned to a volume can help identify its contents or characteristics. For example, if you store documents by the time created, you know that every document associated with that volume was created during a specific time period.
Before deciding on a naming convention, keep in mind that the type of naming convention your organization should use depends on how you plan on using volumes. If you plan on distributing data by publishing or exporting a volume, you probably want to use a naming convention that provides more information about the documents contained in it. For example, you might want to only distribute a certain type of document or documents that were generated from a particular department.
On the other hand, if you do not plan to distribute data by volumes on a regular basis, you should choose a volume naming convention that allows members of your organization to quickly decide on the volume that should be assigned to a new document. For example, if you decide on a time-based volume naming convention, users do not have to constantly assess which volume should be assigned to a document. As long as the time period assigned to that volume (e.g., 2024, Quarter 1 2024, January 2024, etc.) still applies, they know they can continue creating or scanning documents into it.
Tip: Instead of sharing data through volumes, you can use briefcases or publish documents by folders. Both methods provide more flexibility than exporting a volume and reduce the amount of effort required to manage and use a document-specific naming convention for your volumes.
There are two things that you should look out for when storing data in volumes by time period. The first occurs when the specified time period expires. For example, if you decide to name your volumes by year (e.g., 2020, 2021, 2022, etc.), you will need to manually create a volume at the start of each new year. Additionally, you will need to make sure that users are trained to start using the new volume at the start of each new year. The second area of concern is the size to which a volume will grow during the given time period. It is recommended that you limit the size a volume can grow to, to ensure optimum performance and make volumes more manageable when archiving or backing them up.
One way you can limit volume size without more administrative overhead is to use volume rollover, which will automatically create a new physical volume when the current one reaches a given size. If you do not plan on using volume rollover, you will need to calculate the amount of data that needs to be stored during that time period and make sure that this amount is less than the maximum desired size for a volume. If it is not, then you will need to either choose a smaller time period, manually create a volume whenever the current one is filled up, or start using volume rollover.