Search your file serverask the folder that has grown over the years, answers with the source.

Tidying up as a precondition is not part of the plan — it often postpones the start indefinitely. What is mirrored is what you release, including the old years. The answers name file and folder, so you can recognise outdated material by where it comes from: a price list from 2014 gives itself away through its path. If the system finds nothing for a question, it says so. Whatever should deliberately stay out — private material, old job applications, the photo folder from the staff outing — you name in advance, and it will not be read.

It does not have to be logical, it just has to stay the way it is. The path is read along and helps with assignment: a document filed under customer, year and order can be classified that way, even if the file name says nothing — and with Scan_0001.pdf, the path is often the only clue. Where the structure says nothing either, the content of the document counts. You will see in a demo how well that works with your documents. Nothing is moved, renamed or deleted on your side.

The plan is that the documents stay in your instance and the sync is pointed at the new directory during the move; the switch does need to be coordinated, though. The order matters: the sync replicates deletions — if it points to an empty or only half-filled directory while the data is still being moved, it would clear out the knowledge base accordingly. That is why we pause it for the move and only restart it once everything is in place on the new server. If drive letters or share names change, the sync is adjusted; it does not have to run on the new server, but needs read access to the share.

On the server, everything stays as it is; nothing is changed there. In the knowledge base, permissions are defined anew: by document type and role, not file by file. The folder structure helps here, because the path shows what something is about — what sits under HR is rarely correspondence on a construction project. A one-to-one replica of your server permissions would drift apart at the first change on the server without anyone noticing. That is why the HR folder is often left out entirely, and whoever has only recently joined gets a cut-off date.