Recent changes to our Automations may require a small number of our customers to take actions

We have notified a small number of customers that they are running certain Move File and Copy File Automations that rely on a legacy capability that will not longer be supported after April 30th, 2024.

You will know if this applies to you if on the Automations screen, you see the following message: 

One or more of your Copy and Move File automations are using a legacy version, and you must migrate these Automation(s) by April 30.

If you do not see any warning on the Automations page, no action is required. 

Required Action

It was never intended that Move File or Copy File automations would operate on folders, however, due to bugs in the previous implementation, certain customers were able to create Move File or Copy File automations that operated on folders as a whole, rather than their individual files.

You will need to rewrite these automations to operate on individual files and as a result migrate your Automations.

How to Migrate these Automations

These automations may work in certain cases, but are not robust against a variety of failure scenarios, and we encourage you to rewrite them immediately.

Our Customer Support team is happy to help with this migration.  Please contact us to get started.  If you prefer to self-migrate read on.

Self Migrations

In order to determine the action on your part, it is important you answer whether you intend for the automation to apply in a recursive manner.  I.e., do you intend to have the automation apply to the folder or files inside child folders, or did you expect the automation only to apply to files in the identified path (but not subfolders)? 

Example: Source: FolderA/FolderA1/** (indicates all files and folders) and Destination: FolderB/, you intend for all files in folder FolderA/FolderA1 and files in sub-folders to be copied or moved  to the destination FolderB.

If you did not intend for the automation to be recursive

If you did not intend the automation to be recursive, you simply need to create a new automation and delete the old one.  You can even do this by using the “Clone Automation” feature.  Essentially, you’re just confirming that your intention for the automation matches how the automation function was supposed to work.

If you did intend for the automation to be recursive

If you did intend the automation to be recursive, you will need to make one of the following two changes to preserve the current behavior.

If your source path includes a Remote Server (files not stored in Files.com, but a Remote Server), you must delete the automation and configure it as a Remote Server Sync instead.  This is because recursive path targeting is not supported for Remote Servers in Automations.

If the source path does not involve a Remote Server, you will need to modify the automation’s configuration to not be circular in its configuration.  An Automation is circular when the destination of the copy/move is a child of the source path.

You will need to create a new Automation configured with a destination that is relocated outside of the source path.  Once you have a new destination available, create a new Automation with the new destination path.  When creating the new automation, you will need to ensure that the source folder path ends in /** so that it operates recursively.

Additional factors you should keep in mind

Our automations will no longer act upon folders in the source folder, thus you may end up with empty folders left under the automation source folder, these will need to get cleaned up or acted upon.

As a result of the migration of your automation, if you have any other processes relying on the folder paths, these processes may need to change.