General Teamsite concepts

Vid

I Am going through the basic teamsite concepts of workareas, staging, branches etc. Am confused about in how many places a particular file(or copies of it) actually resides? ie, the pdf says : workarea contains virtual copy of all content in a branch? what does virtual copy mean here?

Does a copy of a particular file reside in staging area (ie versions) and also in each workarea of a branch?

thanks and Regards

Adam Stoller

I Am going through the basic teamsite concepts of workareas, staging, branches etc. Am confused about in how many places a particular file(or copies of it) actually resides? ie, the pdf says : workarea contains virtual copy of all content in a branch? what does virtual copy mean here? Does a copy of a particular file reside in staging area (ie versions) and also in each workarea of a branch? thanks and Regards

You clearly should go through some basic TeamSite training course.

However - a virtual copy is just that. Something which appears as if it is a copy of a file - but which is, in reality, a pointer or reference to a file (like a symbolic link in Unix terms).

If a file is not modified from the version that is in staging, then all workareas that contain the specific version of the file will have virtual copies of the files as will the staging area and any editions that also contain that specific version of the file. In most cases it helps to think of the version in STAGING as being "real" and the workareas and editions as containing links to that version -- however the STAGING version is also virtual.

Put another way - given the same scenario - foo.html version 1 (1k in size) in staging, workarea-1, workarea-2, workarea-3, and edition-1, edition-2, edition-3 -- the amount of space required for the above is approximately 1k as opposed to 7k (it's "approximately" because the references to utilize a minimal amount of disk space by their presence). If foo.html were 20k in size, the approximate disk space used in the above example would be 20k as opposed to 140k (and so on)

When you modify a file in a workarea - you replace the virtual copy with a real copy (thus taking up additional space on the disk), once you submit that file to staging, the space utilization remains the same except now the workarea copy is a reference to the new version of the file (other workareas still contain virtual copies - but they are referencing the older version of the file - until a Get Latest is performed, in which case the references are re-set to point to the latest version).

If the above answered your question - great. If not - you really should go through some Interwoven provided training