Vault Maintenance

The Maintenance submenu contains functions for verifying and optimizing the integrity of the internal database structure. Additionally, you can rebuild the full-text search index and reset thumbnail images in the vault. Regular vault maintenance ensures high performance even with vaults containing a large number of objects.

Video: Vault Maintenance - Optimization

Optimize Database

The Optimize Database (Thorough) operation attempts to improve the performance of the vault database by defragmenting indexes, updating database statistics, and compressing the full-text search index.

M-Files automatically runs the Optimize Database (Thorough) operation once a week, so you do not normally need to do this yourself at all. If the vault is, however, responding more slowly than usual, you may want to try running the operation. This may happen, for instance, after a large number of objects has been imported to the vault (for instance if the number of objects in a vault using Firebird as the database engine quickly increases from 0 to 10,000 objects).

The operation can be run in the Quick mode first, but we recommend using the Thorough mode in most cases.

Update encryption status of existing files

Depending on the state of the setting Enable encryption for file data at rest in the Document Vault Advanced Properties, the Update encryption status of existing files does one of the following:

If the Enable encryption for file data at rest has been enabled, all the files in the vault previously not ecrypted are now encrypted as well.
If the Enable encryption for file data at rest has been disabled, the encryption of all the encypted files in the vault is removed.

Rebuild Full-text Search Index

This operation completely rebuilds the full-text search index, and may take up an extensive amount of time in large repositories (with hundreds of thousands of objects and hundreds of gigabytes of data).

We recommend running this operation if you think the search index might be corrupted or if the search operations are more sluggish than usual. In large repositories, especially if the objects get modified a lot, we recommend running this operation twice per year.

Reset Thumbnail Images

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

Verify and Repair

This operation can be used for verifying that the database is intact and that all the data has been saved correctly to M-Files. The Thorough mode additionally checks whether the file sizes and the file checksums of the physical files in the vault data server location match those reported by the metadata database.

If errors are found, some of them can be repaired automatically by M-Files, but some errors might need additional user actions. If you have errors that cannot be resolved automatically, and that you cannot fix yourself, please contact our customer support at [email protected].

We recommend running the Verify and Repair (Thorough) operation twice per year.

Maintenance recommendations

Here is a short roundup of the recommended maintenance operations:

The Optimize Database operation does not need to be run regularly. It is automatically taken care of by M-Files.
The Rebuild Full-text Search Index operation should be run twice a year for large repositories (with hundreds of thousands of objects and hundreds of gigabytes of data).
The Reset Thumbnail Images operation only needs to be used if the thumbnail images are not working correctly.
The Verify and Repair (Thorough) operation should be run twice a year for all repositories.