Storage and files

Openbook does not hold your files. Every file your organization produces — feed images, chat attachments, card attachments, broadcast recordings, check-in videos, anything anyone uploads by hand — is saved once in the Bookbag account service, the same place that holds your sign-in and your organizations. Openbook hands it the bytes and keeps only the id it gets back.

That matters for two reasons a person actually notices:

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

The two pages

Pick your organization in the sidebar and you get both:

• Storage — where this organization's bytes physically sit, and a bar showing how much of the allowance is gone.
• Files — the full list of what is in there, searchable, with upload and download.

Storage and Usage used to be tabs inside Settings. They are not there any more. Settings now holds only what Openbook itself bills for; everything about files is on these two pages.

The allowance is per account, not per organization

This is the one 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 three organizations and use all three products, a recording saved in Madebook makes the bar on Openbook's Storage page go up. Delete it in either place 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.

Two things the bar does not mean:

• It is not a per-organization number. Used and limit are the owner's account-wide totals, even though you are looking at one organization's page.
• The breakdown underneath it — Chat, Recordings, Boards, Profile pictures, Posts and uploads — is scoped to the organization you are looking at. The bar is account-wide; the list beneath it is local. They will not add up, and that is correct.

There is also a thin version of the bar in the sidebar, under "Manage organization", for anyone in the organization.

Where the bytes sit

Each organization chooses its own storage on the Storage page. 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 in interoperability mode, or a self-hosted MinIO or Garage.
• Dropbox — saved under a /bookbag folder in the connected account.
• Microsoft SharePoint / Teams — saved into a SharePoint drive through Microsoft Graph.

Bytes on your own S3, Dropbox or SharePoint are still recorded in the file list, still tagged with where they came from, and still deletable from the Files page — 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, and it needs no one's permission but the organization's own admins.

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.

Your own S3-compatible bucket

Pick the S3 option, then choose a preset — Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, or MinIO / Garage. The preset only prefills the endpoint; any service that speaks the S3 API works, so if yours is not listed, take the closest preset and correct the endpoint.

Then fill in:

• Endpoint — the URL of the service. Leave it empty for real Amazon S3.
• Region — the bucket's region, for example us-east-1.
• Bucket — the bucket name.
• Access key and Secret key — credentials with write access to that bucket.
• Path-style URLs — switch on for self-hosted MinIO and Garage, which generally need path-style addressing rather than virtual-hosted-style.

Dropbox

Provide a Dropbox access token from an app you create at dropbox.com/developers with the files.content.write scope. Files land under /bookbag.

Microsoft SharePoint / Teams

You need an Entra app registration with Files.ReadWrite.All application consent. Then provide the Tenant ID, the Client ID, a Client secret, and the Drive ID of the target SharePoint drive. Teams file libraries are SharePoint drives, so the same settings cover both.

About the credentials

Storage credentials are held by the account service, sealed, and are never handed back out — not even to Openbook. When you reopen the Storage page, every secret reads as a row of dots. Saving the form with a secret left as those dots keeps what is stored, so you can change the region without retyping the key. To replace a credential, clear the field and type the new one.

The two refusals

Both come from the account service, and Openbook does not second-guess either. A limit inside Openbook 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, it applies to every product at once, and it applies whichever storage provider the organization uses. The Storage page prints the current number next to the bar, so you never have to guess.

What to do: compress it, split it, or ask a platform admin to raise the ceiling. They can set it as high as 1GB — no higher, because a whole upload is held in memory while it is decoded.

"Storage is full"

The owner's account has used its whole allowance. New saves 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 from the Files page. Sort out the recordings first — they are almost always the largest thing in the list.
2. Move the organization to its own storage (S3, Dropbox or SharePoint, above). An owner or an admin can do this without asking anyone. 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 Openbook.

The check is made against live usage as the bytes land, not only before the upload starts, so two large uploads racing for the last megabyte cannot both win. If an upload fails partway with this message, nothing was kept.

The Files page

Everything the organization has, newest first, from every product. Each row shows the file's name, its size, where it came from, when it was saved — and, where they differ from the norm, which product saved it and which provider it is stored on.

Where it came from is one of five:

Tag	What it is
Chat	Attachments in chat
Recording	Broadcast recordings and check-in videos
Board	Attachments on kanban cards
Profile picture	Account profile photos
Post / upload	Feed posts, and anything uploaded by hand

What you can do from the list:

• Search by name, and filter by type (images, videos, other files), by where it came from, and by a date range.
• Upload a file by hand with the button at the top right. It is tagged as an upload.
• Download any file. The bytes come through Openbook's own server rather than straight from the bucket, so the bucket stays private and your Openbook session is what authorizes the read.
• Source jumps back to the post, card or room the file came from, when the file records one.
• Delete a file. This removes the bytes, not just the row, and frees the allowance immediately.

Deleting is real and immediate. Anywhere the file was embedded — a post, a card, a session replay — stops loading it. Check before you delete.

The list asks for 200 files at a time on the Files page, 50 on the Storage page. If there are more, it tells you so at the bottom; narrow the search to reach the rest.

What is not in this list

The concierge keeps its chat attachments with the conversation rather than in shared storage — up to 6 per message, 4MB each. They do not appear on the Files page and they do not count against the allowance.

Who can do what

Action	Who
See the Storage page and the usage bar	Any member of the organization
See and search the Files page	Any member
Upload a file	Any member
Download a file	Any member
Delete a file	Whoever uploaded it, or an owner or admin
Change the storage provider and its credentials	Owner or admin
Raise the per-file ceiling or an account's allowance	A platform admin, at the account service

Members who are not admins can open the Storage page and read the settings — with the secrets masked — but Save is refused for them.

Where to go next

• What is on each organization page: Organization settings
• Roles, and who counts as an admin: Members & access
• Setting the ceiling and per-account allowances: Platform administration