Organise 10 years of school files like Google Drive. Without paying Google Drive.

It's the second week of April. The CBSE result PDFs for Class 10 just arrived in the office, and Aarti — the office assistant who has been at Saraswati Public School in Indore for nine years — is staring at her old desktop. The PDFs are sitting on a USB pen drive a colleague brought from the cyber-cafe across the road. The school's previous ERP has a 'documents' tab that asks her to upload one file at a time, with a 30-second wait per file. There are 412 result PDFs. She does the maths in her head and quietly closes the laptop.

This is the bottleneck Indian school offices hit every time the calendar gets busy — admissions in March, marksheets in May, board results in June, sports day in October, cultural fest in February, board affiliation submissions in November. Every event creates a wave of files. Every existing ERP forces single-file uploads through clunky modals, no folder structure deeper than two levels, and a 'rename' button hidden three clicks deep. The result: the school's media is technically 'in the system' but practically lost — nobody can find anything, the office computer's desktop is the actual filing system, and last year's photos live on someone's WhatsApp.

Inkwelly's Folders & Bulk Organize feature exists because we watched this exact moment in 32 schools before we wrote a line of code. This page covers the folder structure, the drag-and-drop upload, and the two batch operations — move and delete — that turn a 412-file evening into a 10-minute job. Plus the safety net that catches the inevitable mistake.

How folders work in Inkwelly Media Center

A folder in Inkwelly is the same idea as the folder you already have on your office desktop — you just keep it inside the school ERP where every staff member can find it. There's no nesting limit. You can have 'School → 2025-26 → Class 10 → CBSE → Marksheets → Term 2' six levels deep without anything slowing down. The folder tree you build in week one will still make sense in year five, because it mirrors how your physical filing cabinet already works: by academic year, by board, by class, by document type.

Every folder shows a small badge with how many files and how many sub-folders are inside it. The 'Old Documents' folder with '0 files · 0 folders' is visibly empty and safe to clean up. The '2024-25 → Class 10 → Term 2' folder with '47 files · 4 folders' is clearly in active use. This small detail becomes essential at year five, when the school has 600 folders and nobody remembers which ones still matter.

When you delete a folder, it doesn't disappear forever — it goes to Trash, with all its contents intact. If the office accidentally deletes the 2022 affiliation evidence on a Sunday night, restoring the whole folder on Monday morning is one click. The same applies to renames — the folder URL stays the same, so any deep-links saved to specific files keep working. And the system stops you from dragging a folder into one of its own sub-folders, which is the classic mistake that breaks every other school ERP we've tested.

From upload to bulk-move in 4 screens

“Pehle marksheets upload karne mein puri shaam lag jaati thi — ek-ek file 30 seconds. Ab 412 PDFs ek baar mein move kar deti hoon. Office wala kaam khatam karke 5 baje hi ghar ja sakti hoon — chai pee ke.”

How Indian schools actually organise their files

1. The annual folder. The cleanest pattern: one root folder per academic year ('2024-25', '2025-26'), then by board ('CBSE', 'ICSE', 'State Board'), then by class, then by document type. Year-on-year archiving is just renaming the old root folder to 'Archive 2024-25'. Every Inkwelly demo school we've watched defaults to this within a week.

2. The events folder. For schools running busy calendars — sports day, annual function, science fair, parent-teacher meetings — a separate 'Events' tree works better than mixing event content into academic folders. Sub-folders by date make finding the September 2025 cultural fest photos a 2-click job in 2027.

3. The compliance folder. Most CBSE / ICSE / state-board schools keep an 'Affiliation' or 'Compliance' folder at the root for board renewals every three to five years. In between renewals, the folder is mostly read-only. Permissions on this folder restrict 'edit' access to the principal and one trusted office staffer.

4. The migration folder. Schools coming from Fedena, Entab or Excel-on-server systems often dump their entire historical archive into a single 'Migrated 2025' folder, then sort it across the year as material gets needed. Inkwelly's bulk-move handles 100-file batches at a time, so a 5,000-file migration is a 50-batch afternoon, not a six-month project.

5. The collaborative folder. Subject departments — Class 11-12 Physics, the maths teachers' room — get a shared folder where any teacher in that department can drop test papers, lab manuals and reference videos. Permissions ensure the same teachers can't accidentally edit Class 5 marksheets across the hall.

See bulk-move and drag-and-drop live in your school's setup

20-minute demo. We move 100 files in one click, delete 100 in one click, and restore them all from Trash. Then you decide.

What every principal asks before saying yes

The first question is always: 'Can our existing files be moved over?' Yes. Schools coming from Fedena, Entab, Excel-on-server systems or even a folder of scanned paper records can bulk-upload their entire history. We've watched a 5,000-file migration finish in one afternoon during a school's December low-traffic week — 50 batches of 100 files, each batch under two minutes. The office assistant runs the upload, the principal walks past every now and then to check progress, and by 5 pm the historical archive is searchable inside Inkwelly. No 'we'll lose our old data' concerns.

The second question: 'What if someone deletes the wrong folder?' Inkwelly's deletion is always to Trash first, never permanent on the first click. A folder deleted on a Sunday night restores fully on Monday morning — files inside, sub-folders inside, original upload dates, file counts, every thing exactly as it was. The deep-links inside Inkwelly that pointed to those files still work, because the file IDs never change. Permanent delete needs a typed name and a 5-second cooldown. We deliberately make irreversible actions hard to fire by accident, because we've watched schools lose years of work to a single misplaced click.

The third question: 'Who can do what?' Inkwelly's permissions are role-based by default. The principal can do everything. Office staff get 'view + upload' on the shared library. Class teachers get 'view' on shared folders plus full access to their own My Files. The IT head — if there is one — can be granted 'manage' (rename, delete, restore) on selected folders. None of this requires custom configuration; the default roles cover what 90% of Indian schools need. For more nuanced setups (department-level edit access, parent-only visibility on specific folders), the super-admin can configure per-folder permissions through a familiar three-click flow.