Files.com maintains a comprehensive audit log of who, what, when, where and how files are modified. This makes it easy to see exactly who is reading, changing, or deleting your files. Users who are logged in to the site and have the appropriate permissions will be able to see the logs and history. By default, the history page will show results for the last 7 days.

The History logs record events including the creation, reading, updating, deletion, movement, and copying of files. It includes user accounts and group related events capturing creation, updates, and deletion. It also monitors the outcomes of login attempts, whether they succeed or failed. However, it's worth mentioning that not every login activity is logged for protocols like FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV, as some FTP clients may reconnect multiple times for a single user action. To enhance log readability, repeated logins from the same IP and protocol within a small timeframe are consolidated. Note that certain file actions lack a specific user association, such as when an external contact uploads to an inbox or downloads from a share link.

Furthermore, the log documents changes in permissions to folders, recording instances where permission is added or removed. Additionally, it tracks the lifecycle of API keys, from their creation to subsequent updates and eventual deletion. As you can see, History logs provide a detailed and organized account of crucial site activities and changes for your site.

This log shows the site-wide activity of files, user accounts, groups, logins, permissions, and API Keys. The History logs are retained for 7 years.

What is Logged

To access the history, type "History" in the search bar at the top of each page, and then click the matching result. The table below explains the information included in each history log entry. Some of the columns are optional and not displayed by default. You can click on the Columns button to change the display.

Actions

Files.com logs all actions related to the creation, deletion, and update of Users, Groups, Files, API keys, and Permissions. We also logs Login activity, such as successful logins and failed logins to your site.

For files and folders, we log additional actions such as below.

Filters

You can apply filters to narrow down your log view. For example, you can filter the logs to display only certain actions performed by a specific user on a particular date. Additionally, you can limit the results to a specific IP address. The available filter options include Start Date and End Date, Action, User, Folder Path, File Path, IP, and Interface.

When using Folder Path or File Path in filters, you can use wildcards to search for specific file or folder names instead of relying on exact paths when the path names are unknown. For example, you can search for *Invoice*.txt to filter any .txt file names containing the key word 'Invoice'.

Folder History

To view the history for a particular folder, you can either filter the History logs by Folder Path or navigate directly to that folder from All Files and click the File history button. Here, you will see a record of each action that has been taken within this folder since its creation.

File History

To view the history for a single file, you can either filter the History logs by File Path or, from the file browser, click on the ellipsis (...) button in the Actions column and select History. Here, you will see a record of each action that has been performed on this file since it was uploaded.

User History

To view the complete activity log for an individual user, you can either filter the History logs by User or navigate to User Accounts, select the user, edit their settings, and then choose the History tab. Here, you will see a record of each action taken by this user from the time their account was created.

Exporting History

You can export the audit logs by clicking Export button on the History page or you can export the same logs directly from your File browser by clicking Export history.

Exporting User Activity History

You can download the activity log history for a specific user or for all the users on your site.

To download the activity log for a specific user, navigate to User Accounts, select the user, edit their settings, and then choose the History tab. Click the Export button.

Exporting User Login History

To download the user login activity log for all the users on your site, go to the users page by typing "Manage Users" in the search box at the top of every page, and then clicking on the first result. Click the Export login history button to start the download. Select a starting and ending date range and the file format for the exported history.

All types of exported history files have fields for When, Who, What, IP, and Interface information. These fields can be searched and filtered in your spreadsheet application.

Interface as Robot in Logs

If you see a history entry with Interface listed as Robot, that means that the file action was performed by an Automation or File Expiration behavior (folder setting) configured on your Site.

Duplicate Entries in Logs

You may notice multiple simultaneous log entries for files being created or read that appear to be duplicates. These are caused by certain third party clients which make multiple requests for the same file, usually to implement concurrency or retries. We plan to eventually improve our history logging to automatically merge such duplicate entries that occur within a 10 minute period, but we haven't released that capability yet.