Using Laserfiche Database To Find File Path

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If you ever need to recover a file that has been deleted from Laserfiche using only the SQL and the file backups, without remounting the entire repository, here is one method to do it. First you need to know the entry id of the document, which you can get via audit trail, or by querying the database backup’s toc table:

select name, tocid, vol_id from toc where name like '%doug%'

(Where the name of the document I’m recovering has the word doug in it.)

Then, using the vol_id:

select * from vol where vol_id = 123456

This will show you the root path (volume) that this document was inside of.

Finally, using the entry id (aka, the tocid):

select storeid from doc where tocid = 654321

This will give you the location to each TIF file within your volume, but first you must decode it. This can be done with any decimal to hexadecimal converter (find this by Googling: decimal to hexadecimal converter)

So, if my storeid is 1856496 this returns the hex number 1c53f0. Break this up into 4 sets of 2. If you don’t have eight characters, add leading zeros.

So 1c53f0 becomes 001c53f0, which then gets broken up to 00, 1c, 53, and f0.

This is the key to the file system in Laserfiche. This file can be found (under your volume path) in the folder: 00\1c\53 (the first 3 sets).

Then the file will be named: 001c53f0.TIF

This is a good reverse engineering trick but, be warned, Laserfiche strongly recommends that you do not tamper with the file system that the software has constructed automatically. It can lead to corrupting your repository and making it no longer work properly.

Doug

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