Content deployment gotchas

When planning for content deployment there is one thing that is important to watch out for: Hard drive space. Specifically, the C: drive. When you deploy content, it is downloaded, compressed, copied, stored, uncompressed and loaded into sharepoint. Sometimes, this process fails and you're left with data lying around. The biggest problem is space. You need at least twice the size of your deployment as free space on your drive. When setting up deployment, you are given the option to setup the location where files are stored temporarily. So you think to yourself, great! I'll set this up on my SAN and have plenty of space. Sadly, this doens't work. This free space is only used to store the CAB files that are moved. It is not used to store the files when they are uncompressed. The cab files are stored in the folder you define(C:\programdata\contentdeployment is the default i believe), but then they are uncompressed and stored in the temporary files folder for the user that runs the process. And to make it worse, ALL of the files are uncompressed before the process begins. This means if you are migrating 10GB of data, you'll need 10GB of free space in the user's home directory, and 10GB of free space in the content deployment folder! So pushing 10GB of data, requires 20GB of space plus the amount of space needed for the manifest XML files which can be quite large. The uncompressed location of the files is: c:\users\\AppData\Local\Temp\ This progess happens quickly and it will clean up the files after it fails. You may look at your computer and see many GB of free space. What you didn't see was the drive filling up and then failing, then deleting the files. So, when setting up content deployment. Figure out how much data you will be pushing with a full content deployment (and plan for future expansion), then add a few more GB for manfest XML(this is probably overkill), then double it. It's not always easy to expand the C: drive later, and moving the temp directory isn't fun. Just make your C: drive REALLY big. Don't forget to check back in every now and then and clean up the files that are sometimes left from a failed deployment. I seen to remember a way to set the max CAB size in 2007, but I don't see it in 2010. Keep in mind that it's actually the minimum cab size, not max. It will keep adding files until the cab reaches the max. If it's one byte below the max, and the next file is 200MB, it will end up with a cab that is 200MB+max-1 byte. This can be confusing when IIS rejects the file because it is too large.