Attachments, XFRocks Attacment Store, & AWS Costs?

Main Company

Main Company

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I'm currently evaluating XenForo as a private collaborative community for a small project team. I've looked at quite a few of the SAAS collaborative community offerings, such as Yammer, Zoho Disucssions, Bloomfire.com & Igloo Software, but I'm not impressed with their threaded conversation capabilities. So, I'm back to evaluating forum software as it provides the conversational granularity that I think our team will require.

We will also require a central repository for files and other types of miscellaneous knowledge objects, like videos that we've downloaded but don't want to publish online publicly. Hence, we're looking into the XFRocks Attachment Store as a way to centralize attachments. It's my understanding that we can either store our files within a hosting directory or via Amazon Web Services (AWS), and I've got the following questions.

  1. Are there any limits to the type of files I can serve within XF? For example, if I have an .avi or .mp4 or .flv video files, will I be able to view these videos via a discussion thread?
  2. If I store the files on AWS, will I be able to view and organize them via another front end tool... something with file manager capabilites?
  3. I'm looking at having to store approximately 3TB of data, with approximately 250-500GB of traffic every month once the files are initially uploaded. Any one here have experience with the costs I can expect from AWS? And will this traffic impact traffic to and from my webhosting provider, or is this traffic to/from AWS routed differently
 
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XenForo has no function built in for locally hosted video. You would need to configure your server accordingly and set that up yourself. Possibly using FlowPlayer or similar.

I can't comment on AWS; there is no integration with it and XenForo.
 
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Jeremy said:
I'm not sure what you are specifically asking? It stores them locally on the same server you run XenForo.
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My apologies for being so unclear.

Is there a specific directory where all attachments are stored? I'm hoping to easily be able to access these files via Webdav as well, which is one of the reasons that I'm asking.
 
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Main Company said:
My apologies for being so unclear.

Is there a specific directory where all attachments are stored? I'm hoping to easily be able to access these files via Webdav as well, which is one of the reasons that I'm asking.
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XenForo stores the files in internal data directory (by default, it is named "internal_data" inside XenForo root directory). It can be accessed with WebDAV or FTP if you configure your server correctly but the files are not available directly via HTTP/HTTPS because the internal data directory is protected.

If you happen to use my add-on [bd] Attachment Store, you have more options to choose to store the files. You may be interested in using Amazon S3.

Regardless of the storing location, XenForo offers a management interface in the AdminCP to manage your files (searching, deleting etc.).

In theory, you can setup players to play movie without many issues.
 
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xfrocks said:
If you happen to use my add-on [bd] Attachment Store, you have more options to choose to store the files. You may be interested in using Amazon S3.
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Thanks very much, xfrocks, for visiting this conversation.

We are planning to implement your Attachment Store and have looked at Amazon S3, but due to an expected cost of several hundred dollar-per-month in Amazon service fees we're most likely going to store our files locally until a later date. Hence we do plan to use Webdav & FTP to access the data directory.

As we have over 1TB of files, is there is anyway we can batch upload the files to this data directory and ALSO grant access to these files from within XF? Or, must we post the files via XF attachments in order to make the files available to XF users? My goal here is to identify an automated or semi-automated approach to the initial population of files within XF.
 
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