From 5.3 and above, Zoom offers the administrators the facility to permanently remove unwanted file-data and thereby salvage disk space. This purge functionality can be invoked from the Asset Browser as well as from the command line client.
From Zoom 7.0 and above, any user assigned to a role with ADMINISTER permission will be able to purge assets in the projects he / she has access to. (Before 7.0, only users in the “superadmin” role were eligible to purge assets.)
The Mechanics of Purge
When a user typically runs purge on an asset either via the Asset Browser or via the command line, internally two steps are executed. First, the asset is marked as deleted, and then the asset is completely purged. Think of this as deleting a file from the Windows Explorer – where, on deleting, a file would end up in the “Recycle Bin” first; and if you empty the “Recycle Bin” it would be permanently removed.
Remember, in Zoom, a deleted asset can be resurrected. Again, drawing a parallel with the “Recycle Bin” – after deleting a file, one could also restore it from the Bin. But once purged, a file is permanently removed from the server and cannot be recovered by any means.
Purge Options
Purge command in Zoom supports two options:
- only-deleted – when this option is enabled, then among the input files/folders specified, only those which are already deleted will be purged; the remaining assets will be left as they are.
- ignore-locks – when this option is enabled, an asset that is locked will get purged successfully. Without this option, a locked asset cannot be deleted, and hence cannot also be purged.
In the Asset Browser, purge can be invoked from the right-click context menu as shown in the screenshot here:
The purge options can be configured inside the Settings as shown here:
On command line ZM PURGE is laid out as shown here:
Purging VideoFX files
Later versions of Zoom have an automatic purge of external VideoFx / VideoLx assets. Check this link for more details.
High-res files ingested with the VideoFX module are external assets that need to be purged in Zoom as well as the NAS/SAN where the native and mid-resolution files reside. Before purging the files for which proxy metadata field is set to true, please click on the link icon in the Asset Browser and navigate to the P-SAN location where the files are. Please delete the P-SAN files from the Ingest Server as permissions are setup typically to only allow a write from the Ingest server. After purging them from the P-SAN, then purge them from the MAM database.
In the figure above, before purging hill.mp4, the proxies on P-SAN Volume: hill-original.mxf and hill-mideres.mov need to be purged.