Hey Yiping,

Thank you for the responses.  We were thinking about creating new volumes and migrating documents into more manageable portions that way we dont have to index everything all at once.  If we make our volumes lets say 20gb volumes 72 gb of free space should be enough to index that volume and move onto the next without failing correct?  (Assuming the 20gb isnt all text documents)  Also, will migrating the documents cause any system down time?

Hello, Kyle,

After re-index the repository / volume, when the documents are modified, there will be index requests, and index files may still take a lot of space (3 * index file size). So it is recommended to keep the large drive you have after re-index, and not to move index files to a smaller drive. For the very same reason, indexing a repository volume by volume is not a solution for the index file space issue. As for volume management itself, you may want to have a look at https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/9.2/en-US/AdminGuide/LFAdmin.htm#Overview_Volumes.htm%3FTocPath%3DLaserfiche%2520Administration%2520Guide%7CVolumes%7C_____0

Index files location is independent with repository and volume locations. This means you can have one volume on drive C, one volume on drive D, and the search catalog on drive E. To change search catalog location, you can follow this page: https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/9.2/en-US/AdminGuide/LFAdmin.htm#Attach_Detach_Index_Catalog.htm%3FTocPath%3DLaserfiche%2520Administration%2520Guide%7CSearch%2520and%2520Indexing%2520Administration%7CIndexed%2520Searches%2520and%2520Indexing%7CManaging%2520the%2520Search%2520Catalog%7C_____3  You need to detach the catalog first, and then move the search files to the new location, and then attach the catalog back. Alternatively, if you don't have any existing index, yet, or you simply want to re-create everything from scratch, you can delete and create the catalog: https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/9.2/en-US/AdminGuide/LFAdmin.htm#Create_Delete_Index_Catalog.htm%3FTocPath%3DLaserfiche%2520Administration%2520Guide%7CSearch%2520and%2520Indexing%2520Administration%7CIndexed%2520Searches%2520and%2520Indexing%7CManaging%2520the%2520Search%2520Catalog%7C_____4 It may take several minutes to perform those operations. During this time, full-text search will not be available. However, users can still do database search, or create, view, modify and delete documents in the repository.

The index files will not go large and large and become 1.8TB. Most likely it will be 100~500GB (depends on the documents in your repository) after several hours or days (depends on the hardware specification of the machine). During the index, the index files will be optimized for several times. Extra disk spaces are required for optimization. It may take 100GB to 1TB. It is possible that optimization only takes several minutes to complete.

You can use Admin Console to track index progress, though it doesn't tell the index file size. https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/9.2/en-US/AdminGuide/LFAdmin.htm#Indexing_Status.htm%3FTocPath%3DLaserfiche%2520Administration%2520Guide%7CSearch%2520and%2520Indexing%2520Administration%7CIndexed%2520Searches%2520and%2520Indexing%7CManaging%2520the%2520Search%2520Catalog%7CIndexing%2520Status%7C_____0

It looks good. 3GB index is too small for 400GB text pages. So that I suppose there are many image pages in the repository. An image page is not necessary a picture. It can be an image copy of a text page, usually generated from the scanner. Image pages are much larger than text pages. It is common that a 400GB text/image repository has only 4GB text pages. In this case, 3GB index makes sense. It can also be some huge electronic documents, like videos. I suggest to pick up some documents and search some words in them. If they are returned in search results, then it should be fine.

You can use desktop client to get the text size and image size. Please right click the root folder of the repository, and then open the property dialog, and then go to the folder tab. Please see https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/9.2/en-US/UserGuide/Laserfiche_Client.htm#cshid=Metadata/Document_and_Folder_Properties_Dialog.htm for details.