Best Practice: Keeping AVAIL Channels Up-to-date with the File System

Tips for identifying the specific files that are present in your file system but not in your AVAIL Channel, or vice versa

FAQ: What is the best way to keep AVAIL channels up to date with my file system?

Often the simplest option is to reindex from the directory level instead of trying to identify the individual files that need to be added. Any content that already exists in the system will be reindexed, but it won't duplicate those items. Any content that hasn't been indexed yet will be added (assuming you haven't filtered it out in the indexing process).
The Enterprise feature, AVAIL Stream, automates Publishing. Stream automatically indexes, updates, and removes content when it is saved to a folder that Stream is monitoring.
Learn more about AVAIL Stream.

Content which has been indexed into AVAIL and subsequently deleted or moved to a new location in the file system, needs to be removed from the Channel
- Use tags and filters related to the content to filter down, then multi-select and remove the content
If there is a great deal of content that needs to be removed and no easy way to identify it, it may be easier to recreate the Channel.
- Channels can be given the same name, so you can essentially create a duplicate Channel:
  - Index the desired content. Tags will automatically be reapplied if the filepaths remain the same
  - Configure the Channel settings (Tag order, Key Cards, etc.)
  - Then unshare the old Channel and share the new Channel

To do a more detailed comparison, here is one workflow option:

In AVAIL, export a list of content per channel using Tag IO.
Use the Command Prompt to generate a csv list of content in your File System
- In File Explorer, navigate to the folder location where you would like the exported csv to be saved
- In the address bar, type cmd. This will launch the Command Prompt with it scoped to the location you had navigated to in File Explorer.
- In the Command Prompt, use the following command, substituting E:\Path\to\Export\ with the path you'd like to get the list of files from.
  This step will create the csv file in the folder you are scoped to, containing a list of all files and subfolders in the path specified in the above command.

dir /s /b "E:\Path\to\Export\" > file_list.csv

Open the Tag IO file in Excel, and copy column B (Filepaths), into the empty column B of the File System csv.
- Select both columns in the csv, and select Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Duplicate Values...
- Change the settings to highlight the Unique cells with the light red fill
- Then highlight column A, select Sort & Filter > Filter
- A dropdown menu will be added to the first cell in column A, select the dropdown and Filter by color, then select the light red color
This should give you a list of everything in that File System location that is not in your AVAIL Channel!
- Note: Folder locations will be included in the list as well, which are not represented in AVAIL and can be disregarded from the list