AEM ACS Commons Renovator

[GFox]

Can we use Renovator to delete assets?  I have 10K+ assets in a folder that has sub folders that I need to retain - not clear on best/easiest tool to use.

[diksha_mishra · Accepted solution]

@GFox since you have sub folders that needs to be retained, the best way to do this bulk delete would be from CRXDE. Steps below:

1. Go to https://server/crxde

2. Create a new folder under /content/dam/newfolder or same level as your folder

3. Locate the folder where 10k assets reside.

3. Move the subfolders to newly created folder by dragging and dropping them.

4. Now the problematic folder only contains 10k assets.

5. Select this folder>Delete

6. Refresh the folders to confirm delete has worked as expected.

Note: the only drawback in this case is that if subfolders were published earlier, they need to be republished (as have new location now). This can be easily done using tree replication. You might need to update page references of these assets also. Try this on a local instance or lower environment to understand the impact better. 

[GFox]

Thanks, I understand the recommended approach.  However, I misstated the volume of assets that I need to delete (seriously misstated)  There are a total of 110K in the folder, with 51K directly under the parent path.  As a result, I cannot open the folder in CRX, this also means that 60K images are in the sub folders. I believe the sub folders are optimized as they are in date based folders that limit total assets in each folder.  The good news is that these are not published as they are WIP files and we are an Assets only implementation.  The bad news, this single-folder volume is not uncommon across the entire repository.  As you can imagine, performance is challenging at times.   Also note this is under AMS services and the overall architecture is 4XL servers.  

Deleting 51K at once seems impossible and why I am turning again to Renovator. I ran a files report on the WIP folder and created worksheets to reduce the volume should I use the tool to "move" them to a temporary folder where we will delete.  My concern is I understand the "move" is actually a delete and recreate process in AEM.  If so, this seems like an added burden on the system - so is there a recommend limit on how many "renovator moves" I would target? 

Any thoughts on how else I could achieve my objective? 

[diksha_mishra]

Understood. Thank you for sharing more details. As far I can suggest, you might need to disable DAM Update Workflow first. This will help manage any extra load on the system and files will simply move from your current folder to a temp folder. Please try the renovator with 10-20k assets at a time. I hope this will be a successful operation, please keep us posted. 

[GFox]

I was able to use the Renovator tool to move the assets to individual (i.e., smaller) folders where I can easily delete via the UI.  To do this, it was a bit labor intense in that I started with running the AEM FILES report on the parent folder and then used excel to sort into smaller segments (based on some value such as brand, or type) and saved as separate excel files based on the rules for Renovator.   Then ran each of the files throughout the weekend.  The largest move was 13K and it ran for ~20 min.   In general this worked, but it wasn't easy and subject errors in my sorting/typing.   

Hope this helps others

[manpreetk908]

Hi Diksha,

We also had a similar use case in our project and need to move close to 100k assets to a different folder. We tried using AEM OOTB move functionality but it is extremely slow. I wanted to know if ACS Refactor is efficient than AEM OOTB operations of move, delete etc.? Any other suggestion that we could have utilized for our user case?

Thanks,

Manpreet