Understanding the content store architecture

The content store controls the creation and deletion of binary content in the filesystem. We have already covered a few details on this in earlier chapters. The dir.root property in the alfresco-global.properties (<Tomcat_Home>/shared/classes) file defines the root binary file storage location.

Let's, for example, examine the path specified in dir.root which is /mnt/alf_data. Beneath this directory, there are two folders: contentstore and contentstore.deleted, which will be created the first time Alfresco is started. Let's have a look at the details of the folder:

• contentstore: All active and archive content is being stored here. Based on content creation time, a directory hierarchy is created. All the files will have a unique name and the .bin extension. Let's say there is a file named Employee Handbook.doc being uploaded in Alfresco on January 20, 2015 at 10:50 A.M., then the file will be stored in /mnt/alf_data/contentstore/2015/1/20...