Hi there,

We have a Basecamp Max plan with 50 GB of filestorage space.
Until now, we’ve been hosting the files on our own machine. We’re up to 15 Gb and would like to offload this to Basecamp.

Is there a good way or process to easily move the 15 of files?

Any best practices or suggestions?
Thanks,
Dom

I’m pretty sure the answer is no. AFAIK 37 Signals don’t provide you with direct access to the S3 area used to store them when you use the ‘plan’ storage, so you can’t FTP them over or such like.

But even if you could that wouldn’t help, as Basecamp stores information about attached files on external FTP servers as ‘hard wired’ URLs. What is more, Basecamp doesn’t seem to ‘know’ about these attachment links after they have been created – if you change a project name or associated with a different ‘company’ (so files get stored in a different place in the FTP server) all Basecamp does is change URLs it uses for new links. All the old links point to where it thought to place them given the old name / company association. It’s really crude (or really simple) depending upon your point of view.

What this means is that if you want to change the location of lots of files (and I’m guessing 15GB is a lot…) you need to find a way to edit the hard-wired URLs that make up all these links. Now given how Basecamp works, there is no way to predict where a file might be stored based on where the link appears in the Basecamp hierarchy, so you the best you could do would be to do some sort of global edit – change the root of the URL to point to some useful equivalent in the S3 storage system perhaps.

This is pretty awkward – since Basecamp don’t provide any access to where the URLs are stored… (are you spotting a common thread here…?). So next best thing would be to do something clever on your FTP server to map HTTP requests for the files to the appropriate location in S3 storage… hmm… but hang on, that won’t work because you can’t access the S3 storage directly.

So, ends up you are stuffed multiple ways. Either you employ someone to manually migrate your entire Basecamp attached files to S3 storage (i.e., one attachment at a time…), or you simply bolt a bigger disk into your FTP server. Almost certainly you’ll be better off simply adding more storage.

HTH

HI Jacques,

Unfortunately we’re not able to remap files for you. Files uploaded to the old FTP server will continue to point to the old FTP server. All files uploaded after you’ve changed your settings will point to the new server. If people still need to access an older file, you should just upload the file again. It will link to the new server.
– Sarah

Would be great if they added support for copying files from FTP/SFTP over to s3 as part of a migrate your data over to s3?

While they were at it, it would be great if they included information about attached files in the Basecamp XML export (at least last time I checked they didn’t) and provided a mechanism for you to extract / backup / manage your files from S3 storage once they were there.

I don’t know what happens to organisations that for whatever reason want to move away from Basecamp. But it would appear that there is no easy way to get your attachments back – and if you do they will be separated from the information in the Basecamp message store (as in, you’ll not know where they ‘attach’).

Basecamp should be confident enough in the quality of Basecamp to rely on people staying with them because the product is good – not because they’ve hijacked their data ‘Hotel California’ style.

Basecamp should be confident enough in the quality of Basecamp to rely on people staying with them because the product is good – not because they’ve hijacked their data ‘Hotel California’ style.

Not that this forum support sigs, but that there is sig worthy.