Vault Maintenance

Regular vault maintenance makes sure that there is high performance even for vaults with a large number of objects. The Maintenance submenu for a vault in M-Files Admin contains functions to verify and optimize the integrity of the internal database structure. It also contains functions to rebuild the full-text search index and to reset thumbnail images in the vault. Also, it is important to regularly verify the integrity of your vault and master database backups.

It can also be helpful to see the Why is my M-Files not as fast as it used to be? FAQ article. It contains many frequently encountered issues that can cause system slowness.

Maintenance recommendations

Summary of the recommended maintenance operations:

• Use the Rebuild Full-text Search Index operation twice a year for large repositories (with hundreds of thousands of objects and hundreds of gigabytes of data).
• Use the Reset Thumbnail Images operation only if the thumbnail images do not work correctly.
• Use the Verify and Repair (Quick) operation twice a year for all repositories.
• Clean the vaults at least once a year.
• Verify the integrity of your master database backups at least two to four times a year.
  • Refer to M-Files Backup Policy for further guidelines and best practices related to backups.
• Verify the integrity of your vault backups at least two to four times a year.
  • If Microsoft SQL Server is used, refer to the documentation of the backup tools you use to create the backups for instructions.
  • If Firebird SQL database is used, see Backing Up a Vault and Restoring a Vault for instructions.
  • When you restore test vaults, make sure that you do not accidentally overwrite the production vault. In addition, when you restore a vault with a new GUID, make sure that you do not let the restored vault, when asked, use any external connections. This can cause problems if the production vault uses the same connections. Finally, please make note that the restored vault can cause, for example, scripts to be executed and assignment emails to be sent.
  • Refer to M-Files Backup Policy for further guidelines and best practices related to backups.

Optimizing the database

The Optimize Database (Thorough) operation tries to improve the performance of the vault database. The operation defragments indexes, updates database statistics, and compresses the full-text search index.

M-Files automatically does the Optimize Database (Thorough) operation once every week. Normally, it is not necessary to do this yourself. However, if the vault operates more slowly than usual, it can be necessary to do the operation. The vault can respond slowly after a large number of objects is imported to the vault. For example, if the number of objects in a vault that uses Firebird quickly increases from 0 to 10,000 objects.

You can do the operation in the quick mode first, but we recommend to use the thorough mode in most cases. For instructions, see Manual Optimization.

See Task Order in Thorough Optimization for the list of tasks done during the thorough operation.

Updating encryption status of existing files

After you have run the Update encryption status of existing files, you must manually run the Optimize Database (Thorough) operation to remove the old file data of the vault. If the option Delete the files of destroyed objects is available, select it.

Rebuilding the full-text search index

We recommend this operation to be done if you think that the search index is corrupted or if the search operations are slower than usual. In large repositories, especially if the objects are edited a lot, it can be helpful to do this operation twice every year.

Resetting thumbnail images

You can reset the thumbnail image cache for the vault if you use the thumbnail view in M-Files Desktop and if the images are not working correctly. This can happen, for instance, after installing a software capable of displaying thumbnails that could not previously be shown.

Using Verify and Repair

You can use this operation to verify that the database is intact and that all the data has been saved correctly to M-Files.

If errors are found, M-Files repairs some of them automatically, but some errors need user actions. If you have errors that cannot be fixed automatically or you cannot fix yourself, write to our customer support at [email protected].

For large vaults, the operation time of Verify and Repair (Thorough) can be long. Thus, we recommend that you use the operation in the quick mode twice per year.

The steps during the Verify and Repair (Quick) and Verify and Repair (Thorough) operations are the same except for the verification of physical data files (step 4). In this step, the thorough mode checks whether file checksums of the physical files in the vault file data location match those reported by the metadata database.

Cleaning the vaults

When you clean the vaults, you release disk space for new objects.