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File Archiving and unused version cleanup
Hello,
So I was trying Prism for a few day now, I like how it work so far, but I noticed there is not way to delete asset or version.
I was wondering if there would be a way for prism to automatically archive/delete any older version of an asset if it not used anywhere else, as some maya file can start taking a huge amount of space with every save, which cumulate overtime, having a way to just archive unused asset into a bigger/slower drive and not saturate the current workspace SSD, with still the ability to 'recover' the archived version.
Right, currently there is no way for doing this. You can omit Assets and Shots, but that only removes then in the Project Browser for a cleaner project and not from disk.
You could remove/move the folder of a shot or a version to a backup location manually. That doesn't produce any problems with Prism, since they are not stored in any database.
I didn't added options to remove files to the Project Browser because it could happen that new users remove files by accident. So I'd like to add extended user accounts with different permissions before I add options to delete files.
Another problem is the local folder. Prism has the option to use a local folder to save unimportant files to the local drive, while all important files are saved to the main project on the server. If a shot gets deleted in the main project folder, there still can be scenefiles and renderings from this shot on the local drive of other artists. So I need to find a way to delete all files from this shot from multiple computers, which is a bit more complicated.
It would be possible to track which versions are used in other files in a project, but if an artist imports an old version manually and not through the Prism StateManager, it's almost impossible to track this. I think if Prism would delete old versions automatically there will be many people who would blame me for deleting things that were still needed in some way. Maybe Prism could give you a list with old versions, which look like they are not used anywhere and then you could select which of them you want to delete/archieve.
That's definitely a nice feature for upcoming versions.
I understand the concern about deleting file from a team point of view, by 'automatic' I wasn't implying that Prism would do it out of his own will, more like an admin function 'clean up' which would not necesserly delete file, but at least archive them into a different location, say you have right now the main Project foldet, and the local project folder, an 'archive project' on a different network/drive would be a nice addition.
concerning the tracking on file not imported through the StateManager, you could maybe consider some scene callback for the prism plugin to check up any file reference in the scene and attempt a 'rebuild' of an import Task ? I believe simply checking the path of the FileReference object should be more than enough to detect if it have been a manual import of an asset managed by prism. If in the other case, the file have been imported and merged into the scene, there is no need to worry if the original scene exist or not.
I see, an admin clean up function makes sense.
For the dependecy tracking it would be nice to have an overview in the Project Browser, which shows where the asset is used and what external files are used in that asset scenefile, without having to open the scene. It will take a bit of time to add this feature to Prism.
Hi Richard,
Is there any new cache cleanup system integrated into Prism? It would be great if we had a cache cleanup system atleast for the admin and the user who generated the cache, either as a shelf tool in the dcc or a separate option within the Project Browser.
Thanks,
Sharan