Storage and files

Madebook does not hold your files. Every file saved for your organization — chat attachments, profile pictures, anything uploaded by hand — is saved once in the Bookbag account service, the same place that holds your sign-in, your organizations and your chat.

Two things follow that a person actually notices:

• One file list per organization. It shows files any Bookbag product saved for that organization, not just Madebook's.
• One allowance per account, spent across every product. Filling it in one product fills it in the others too. That is the part that surprises people, and it is covered in full below.

It is the same arrangement as the token allowance, one unit along: one number per account, shared, set at the account service.

What Madebook shows: the storage bar

Madebook has no storage page and no files page of its own. What it shows is a small storage bar under the organization's name in the organization switcher, at the foot of the sidebar. OpenBook and CodeBook draw the same bar.

• The bar is the owner's allowance, filled to how much of it is used. Hover over it to see the figures, for example Storage: 12.4MB of 30.0MB used.
• It is indigo normally, amber above 80%, and red when the allowance is full.
• Anyone in the organization sees it. It is hidden when the account service does not answer, and for anyone who is not a member.

Where the files are managed

On the organization's page at your Bookbag account (sso.bookbag.ai/user/organizations/<id>). It has a Storage page (the allowance and where the bytes are kept) and a Files page (what is stored). To get there from Madebook, use Manage organization ↗ on the organization's Home.

Madebook's old Storage page, /organizations/<id>/storage, redirects there. It used to show the allowance, the provider settings and the file list; those are now only at Bookbag account.

The allowance is per account, not per organization

This is the rule worth reading twice.

The allowance belongs to an account — a person's Bookbag login — and it is charged to the owner of the organization. Every organization that account owns draws on the same number, and so does every other Bookbag product that account uses. There is one pile of bytes.

So if you own two organizations and use two products, a recording saved in OpenBook makes the storage bar in Madebook go up. Delete it and the bar goes down in both.

The default allowance is 30MB per account unless a platform admin has changed it. That is small on purpose: it is the free tier, and the two ways past it are below.

The bar is not a per-organization number. Used and limit are the owner's account-wide totals, even though the bar sits under one organization's name.

Where the bytes sit

Each organization chooses its own storage, on its Storage page at Bookbag account. Four options:

• Bookbag storage — the platform's own bucket. The default, no setup, and the only option that counts against the allowance.
• Your own S3-compatible bucket — Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, or a self-hosted MinIO or Garage.
• Dropbox.
• Microsoft SharePoint / Teams — saved into a SharePoint drive through Microsoft Graph.

Files on your own S3, Dropbox or SharePoint are still listed and still deletable — they are simply not metered. You are paying that provider directly, so the allowance stops applying. Moving to your own bucket is therefore the fastest way out of a full allowance.

Changing the provider does not move the files you already have. New files go to the new provider; existing ones stay where they were written and keep counting exactly as before. If your allowance is full and you switch to your own bucket, the bar stays full until you delete the old files.

Storage credentials are held by the account service, sealed, and are never handed back out — not even to Madebook.

The two refusals

Both come from the account service, and Madebook does not second-guess either. A limit inside Madebook that disagreed would refuse files the platform would happily take and accept files it will not.

"That file is too large"

One file is over the per-file ceiling. The ceiling is 20MB unless a platform admin has raised it, and it applies to every product at once. A platform admin can set it as high as 1GB — no higher, because a whole upload is held in memory while it is decoded.

What to do: compress it, split it, or ask a platform admin to raise the ceiling.

"Storage is full"

The owner's account has used its whole allowance. New saves to Bookbag storage are refused everywhere that account owns something, in every product, until something changes.

What to do, in the order most people want them:

1. Delete files at Bookbag account. It frees the allowance immediately.
2. Move the organization to its own storage (S3, Dropbox or SharePoint, above). Remember that existing files keep counting until you delete them.
3. Ask a platform admin for a higher allowance. They set it per account, at the account service, not in Madebook.

Chat attachments

Attachments in organization chat are ordinary files in this storage. They count against the allowance, appear in the organization's file list tagged Chat, and are charged to the organization owner's account like every other byte.

Deleting a message does not delete its files. The message goes; the bytes stay in the file list and keep counting. To reclaim the room, delete the file itself as well.

Who can do what

Who may upload, delete or change the storage provider is decided by the account service, not by Madebook. The one thing Madebook still reads is the usage figure for the storage bar, and only members of the organization get an answer.

Where to go next

• The same idea with tokens as the unit: The token allowance
• Where attachments come from: Organization chat
• What is managed at Bookbag account rather than here: Where everything is