Admin Panel — Migration

The Migration tab of the Folio Admin app moves documents in and out of Folio. It has two tabs of its own: Import and Export.

Both run as background jobs with their own history table, so you can start a job, leave, and check the result later.

Import

Import turns .docx and Markdown files into Folio Documents. Every file you upload creates one new Folio Document, owned by you as the person running the import.

What’s Included

Folio imports text only. Images are skipped and noted in the job log. This is worth knowing when a file is close to the size limit — a 5 MB document is almost always mostly images, so removing them usually brings it under.

Anything unsupported is dropped and recorded in the log rather than failing the file.

Uploading files

Click Upload Files, or drop files onto the upload area.

Files stage in a list before anything runs, with a running count and an × on each row so you can drop one you didn’t mean to add. The button reflects the count — Import 3 file(s) — so you can confirm the set before starting the job.

After import: Delete the uploaded files is an optional checkbox. With it selected, Folio deletes the ContentDocument records created for the import — but only for files that converted successfully, and only files you uploaded yourself.

Files that fail are always kept so you can inspect them. Deleted files are recoverable from the Recycle Bin until it’s emptied.

Leaving the box unchecked keeps every uploaded file in the org. See Import and export files for the storage implications.

Import limits

More than 500 files is refused at submission, with the message “Import is limited to 500 files per job. Upload them in smaller sets.”

A file over 5 MB fails on its own with:

<file>: file is too large to import (X MB; the maximum is 5.0 MB). Folio imports text only, so removing images usually brings a file under the limit.

That advice is worth taking literally — since images aren’t imported anyway, stripping them costs nothing and usually clears the limit.

The character limit applies to encoded content, so formatting counts toward it — a heavily formatted document holds less text than a plain one.

One bad file never stops the others. Files that exceed a limit or can’t be parsed fail individually and are listed in the job log with the reason. Everything else in the job still imports.

Import History

Each job appears in the Import History table below the upload area. Refresh updates the table.

When a job imported many files, the Files column shows a count above the list — 20 files — so a large job doesn’t crowd out the rows around it.

Reading the job log

View Log expands the log beneath its row, and Hide Log collapses it again. It records anything worth knowing about the job — unsupported file types, formatting that couldn’t be carried across, and a note when source files were deleted:

PurgeBad.png: unsupported file type "png". Import accepts .md and .docx files.
2 uploaded file(s) were deleted after import. They are recoverable from the Recycle Bin until it is emptied.

A log doesn’t mean something went wrong. A job that completed cleanly still logs the deletion note when source files were removed, so View Log on a green Completed row is routine rather than a warning.

Export

Export turns Folio Documents into Word or Markdown files. The tab walks through four steps.

1. Choose what to export

Filters narrow which Documents are included. Any filter left blank is ignored.

In any multi-select list, Shift-click selects a range.

Include archived documents pulls in Documents that were archived rather than deleted — relevant when hard delete is disabled, which is the default.

Preview match count reports how many records the current filters match, as “X document(s) match”, before you commit to the job. Clear all filters resets every field at once.

Export runs in your own context, so you only ever export Documents you already have access to. A Folio Admin without visibility of every Document exports only the subset they can see — the job succeeds and looks complete, but silently covers less than the filter implies.

For a full-coverage export, run it as a Salesforce Administrator, or as a user holding View All on the Folio Document object in addition to the Folio Administrator permission set.

2. Choose a format

Bulk export offers these two formats. A single Document can also be exported as PDF, via Export as… in the editor’s 3-dots overflow menu.

3. Choose a destination

Download as a .zip — everything is packaged into zip files you download from the job row.

Documents are batched 25 per zip part, so a large export produces several parts presented as one download set. A 10,000-document export produces 400 parts. The zips are stored as ContentDocuments and are subject to Document Export Retention, which purges them after 6 months by default.

Save to Files on each document — each Document is converted to the chosen format and filed against itself and every record it was related to at the time of processing. This is the same behavior as Save to Files on a single Document. Nothing is downloaded.

That timing matters: a relationship added after the job starts won’t get a copy of the file.

Save to Files output is never purged by retention. Only Download archives expire. Setting retention to 0 keeps Download archives indefinitely too.

4. Handle Folio-only content

Some Folio content has no equivalent in a Word or Markdown file. These two dropdowns decide what happens to it.

Record Links and Live Fields

• Export the current value — the name of Record Links and the values in Live Fields are resolved at export time.
• Value plus a bracketed description — the same value, followed by a bracket holding four parts joined by ·: object · record name · field label · record ID. The record name is usually the part a reader needs; the ID is there for tracing it back.

Salesforce Components

• Render their current data — each Status Bar, Record Preview, Related List, Workbench, and Kanban Board is queried and written into the file as a table of its current values.
• Describe them in a placeholder — the same components are replaced with a description of what was there.
• Leave them out entirely — omit them from the output.

Rendering current data makes a job noticeably slower. Each component has to be queried, so Documents containing them are exported one at a time to give each its own query budget. On a large export, choose a placeholder or omission unless the component data is what you’re exporting for.

Click Start export to begin the job.

Export limits

A filter matching more than 10,000 Documents is refused before the job starts:

That filter matches N documents, which is above the 10000-document limit. Narrow the filter and try again.

Nothing runs and no job record is created.

Export History

Each job appears in the Export History table. Refresh updates it.

View Settings records the whole configuration that produced a job — format, destination, record type, whether archived Documents were included, every filter that was set, and how Folio-only content was handled. It expands beneath the row, so an export can be reproduced or audited long after it ran.

Images are not carried into exported files. Image bytes aren’t embedded in the output, so each one is dropped and noted in the log. That mirrors import, where images aren’t brought in either — Folio moves text in both directions.

Limits that come from Salesforce

A few constraints aren’t Folio’s and apply to any org:

• 5 batch jobs running concurrently, with 100 queued.
• A daily asynchronous execution allowance.

Both jobs process in chunks sized against Salesforce’s 12 MB asynchronous heap limit: 10 files per chunk on import, 25 documents per chunk on export.

The units differ because each job iterates over a different thing — uploaded files going in, Documents coming out. On export, one .zip part is written per chunk, which is why parts hold 25 documents each.

A very large migration may need to run across more than one day.

Related: Use the Admin Panel · Settings · Data Storage in Folio · Tags