Open Dental Forum

Has anyone seen an issue with entire image folder contents being deleted? Its not happening in all the folders and seems to me concentrated in certain letters, like M and N. We find it by clicking on the image file link in OD. It says file not found. When we use explorer to look in the folder, there are no files whatsoever in the patients folder. The entire folder contents is being deleted. The only thing that comes to mind is that we run "optimize" and "fix" daily in database maintenance. Is there some provision in OD to clean out folders of their contents?

Thanks for reading.

It may be possible that the contents of these folders are being stored on your client machines.

To be able to confirm this, on each workstation, in Open Dental, go to Setup > Data Paths.

1) Verify that in the first box, it shows the path to the OpenDentImages folder located on your Server. (example: \\Server\OpenDentImages\". If it shows "C:\OpenDentImages\" these files are then being stored locally and will need to be moved to the server.

2) The option 'Use multiple paths' is not selected

3) The 'Path Override' box, is blank

4) The option 'Store images directly in the database' is not selected.

check your folder permissions. Take ownership of the folder and make sure you share the folder accordingly. good luck

Thank you for the assistance. We have several offices, so I'll investigate and report back.

I'm not sure what is happening in your production environment but I can tell you that Open Dental does not delete or clean up anything in the images folder. We have seen some third party software directly manipulate the files in the A to Z folder, but that is fairly uncommon. It is much more likely that :

StaceySampson wrote:... the contents of these folders are being stored on your client machines.

Hope you find out what is happening.

one time someone actually deleted part of my images folder by going to the actual shared folder in windows explorer when they thought they were deleting an image. I was very glad to have a backup that did not replicate deletions as I didn't realized this happened until the next day. I replicate my data in two forms, 1) including deleted data and 2) a backup that never deletes anything for cases like this.