Best practices for duplicating Guides content? (Should Assets folder copy/paste work?)

[Andrew_Reuter]

Hey folks! My team has this use case: As a content manager, I want to create a copy of a folder containing thousands of Guides items so I can use samples of "real" content for things like training, testing, etc. without giving access to the "real" content itself.

We tested using Assets to copy/paste a folder of content in our Dev environment, and it appeared to work correctly.

1. Go to Assets/Files
2. Check mark the folder you want to copy in the thumbnail view on the right
3. Click copy
4. Select the folder you want to paste into in the content tree on the left
5. Click paste at the top of the screen

But when we try to do the same with our real content in our Stage environment, we get errors like this, and the content copy fails right away:

POST /bin/linkmanager HTTP/1.1] com.adobe.fmdita.link.LinkManagerAPI Error! in LinkManager API

com.adobe.guides.core.exception.ApplicationException: Unable to copy path /... /causes-pulmonary-edema-consumer.dita due to null

So we're wondering, is that a legit error with our system or content that we shouldn't be seeing, and this copy/paste process should work? (IE we need to chase down these errors?)

Or, is there a better way to duplicate large amounts of Guides content like this? Ex: Some way to package the content we want, manipulate the package to give duplicated content new titles/GUIDs, then reupload? Or are there other thoughts?

Thank you!

[DivrajSingh]

@Andrew_Reuter : In this case it seems to be an error with the content references.
Would it be possible to share more details like:
- Size of copied folder (number of files/folders, and total size)
- Complete stack trace of error you noticed, would help identify version of AEM Guides and which type of reference caused it

- Does this happen with any folder or a specific folder?

Probably a support ticket would be better to share all this information

[Andrew_Reuter]

Hey Divraj: Sorry for the delay in replying here. I believe the Guides engineer who worked on this case identified that the issue is with file size. Copying Guides assets from the assets menu is limited to around 15kb; anything over that, it fails. We've been moving forward with that response for now and using workarounds like Oxygen for copying until this is updated, but if you think that's wrong, glad to revisit it. Thank you!

[DivrajSingh · Accepted solution]

@Andrew_Reuter : this is correct - the issue you pointed is related and you can continue to follow up on the support ticket for recommendation on this.