Version control of attached document files

Question

Hello all,

A search six ways 'til Sunday finds nothing about this here, in the community. I'm wondering if it's because it's such a basic question. At this job, and a new Confluence user, for 1 month and a bit.

I've got a draft style guide, in Word. (I haven't brought it into Confluence yet. I find Confluence very limiting, and I am not a lover of MS Word! In this case, familiarity plus richer feature set beats dislike of giant feature-creature app).

That was created 12 days ago, so I want to update it. I've just created a page, and attached the initial version.

Does Confluence store previous versions of such documents? Same question for images. I do like that you can drag the same-named file into Upload if you need to update an image, and it'll automatically replace what's there. I suspect the answer's yes, for both.

Thank you,
Pat O'Connell
Tech writer
Montreal

Vadim Rutkevich_4dwnfh · Answer

Hi Patrick,

you can also try Smart Attachments for Confluence. This app allows you to have a file storage on a space level and keep your files there.

So, in this way you have a single entry point for storing attachments that are used by multiple teams and users. It also supports revisions, so you just need to drag-n-drop a new revision into the folder.

Feel free to drop an email to vrutkevich@stiltsoft.com if you have some questions.

Thanks.

Sincerely, Vadim

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Your assumption is correct - Confluence doesn't care what you're attaching, it just versions each file you send it.  If you have files with different names, you get different attachments.  When you give it files of the same name, it simply creates version n + 1.

However, I'd be tempted to import the document instead.  That will create it as a Confluence page, which gives you far more functionality (versioning still, but also diffs and records of who changes stuff between versions, collaborative editing and immediate presentation instead of having to download a file)