> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.praxis-ai.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# File Processing Status
> What happens when you upload a document — the 5-phase processing pipeline and what each status means.
When you drop a file into your IP Vault, it doesn't become instantly searchable. Pria runs it through a **five-phase pipeline** that extracts text, breaks it into searchable segments, cleans it up, embeds it as vectors, and finalizes it for retrieval. Knowing what each phase does — and what each status means — helps you spot trouble early and reprocess only what needs reprocessing.
***
## The journey from upload to searchable
```
Upload → Extract → Chunk → Sanitize → Embed → Finalize → Included
```
Each phase commits its work before the next one starts, so a failure surgically retries only the failed phase — you don't lose progress on a 200-page PDF because the last batch of embeddings timed out.
You can watch the journey live on the **file card** in the vault. The progress bar advances through the phases, and the percentage shows real work done (not interpolated time).
Files uploaded with **Skip Indexing** checked bypass this pipeline entirely — they're stored for safekeeping and download but never become searchable (and never incur indexing cost). Run **Reprocess Content** later if you change your mind.
***
## The 5 phases
Pria reads the source bytes and turns them into clean text.
| Source type | What Extract does |
| ---------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **PDF / DOCX / PPTX / XLSX** | Parses text directly. Image-based PDFs fall back to OCR. |
| **Images (JPG, PNG, etc.)** | Vision model description + OCR for any embedded text. |
| **Audio / video** | Transcribes speech to text. Files over 25 MB are auto-split, transcribed in parallel, and re-stitched. |
| **Email (`.eml`, `.msg`)** | Headers + body, including inline attachments. |
| **HTML / web pages** | Strips navigation, ads, and boilerplate; keeps article text. |
| **Jupyter notebooks** | Flattens markdown and code cells. |
| **ZIP / IMSCC archives** | Each member becomes its own file and re-enters the pipeline. |
The card sits between **5% and 40%** during extract. Long videos and large PDFs spend most of their time here.
The extracted text is split into **segments of about 8,000 characters each** (roughly 1,500–2,000 words). Segments overlap by \~5% so a sentence that lands on a boundary still appears whole in one of the two neighbours.
Segment boundaries snap to the nearest paragraph or sentence end — chunks never tear mid-thought.
The card runs **40% to 50%** during chunking. Even huge files finish this phase in seconds.
Each segment is screened by a quick heuristic. Clean prose passes through untouched — no LLM call, no cost. Segments that look noisy (OCR garbage, broken formatting, navigation residue) are rewritten by your institution's summary model into cleaner prose.
Sanitize is **enabled by default**, but your administrator can turn it off per institution.
The card runs **50% to 75%** during sanitize. The bar advances in real time as each batch comes back from the model.
Every segment is converted to a **vector embedding** — a high-dimensional numerical representation of its meaning. Embeddings are what make semantic search possible: your Digital Twin compares the vector of your question against every segment vector to find the closest matches.
Pria optionally enriches each segment with 2–3 AI-generated keywords plus a document-level summary header before embedding. This makes single-segment matches more findable.
The card runs **75% to 95%** during embed.
The final phase is cheap closing work:
1. **Vault Health Grade** is computed from the final segment set.
2. The file's status flips from `inactive` to **Included**, which is the trigger every retrieval path checks.
3. Scratch data is cleaned up.
4. Token usage is rolled into the billing record.
Until the status flips to **Included**, retrieval will skip the file entirely. The card jumps from **95% to 100%** during finalize.
***
## Reading the progress bar
The bar on each file card shows the **active phase** and the percentage of work completed within the pipeline. The percentage reflects actual segments processed, not interpolated time — so 50% really means half the segments are through.
| Status chip | What it means |
| -------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Queued** | Waiting for a worker to pick it up. Usually a second or two. |
| **Extract** | Pulling text from the source. |
| **Chunk** | Splitting text into segments. |
| **Sanitize** | Cleaning noisy segments. |
| **Embed** | Generating vector embeddings. |
| **Finalize** | Wrapping up and computing health. |
| **Included** (green) | Done. Searchable. Cited in chat. |
| **Error** (red) | A phase failed and exceeded its retry budget. Click for details. |
The counter updates in batches, not one segment at a time. On short files the bar may pause briefly before jumping ahead. That's normal — work is still in flight.
***
## Vault Health Grade
After finalize, every file gets a **Vault Health Grade** — a quick read on how usable the file is for retrieval. The badge appears on the file card and contributes to your overall Vault Health letter grade (A–F).
### What affects the grade
Clean, well-structured prose scores highest. OCR-heavy text, garbled characters, and code-dominant content lower the grade.
Files that produce a reasonable number of well-sized segments grade better than tiny one-segment files or oversized monolithic blobs.
Scanned PDFs with high OCR confidence grade higher than blurry image-based documents.
Files with extractable titles, authors, and structure (headings, sections) help Pria retrieve more precisely.
If a file scores poorly, open it in the **File Preview** to see what's flagged, then run **Sanitize All** on its segments or re-upload a cleaner source.
***
## Common issues
| Symptom | Likely cause | What to do |
| ------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **File too large** | Single file over 150 MB, or batch over 500 MB | Split the file, or upload in smaller batches. |
| **Unsupported format** | The file type isn't in the [supported list](/mdx/user-guide/files-documents/managing-files#supported-file-formats) | Convert to a supported format (PDF, DOCX, MP4, etc.) before upload. |
| **OCR failed / empty extract** | Scanned PDF with very low image quality, or a corrupt source | Try a higher-resolution scan, or transcribe the document manually. |
| **Audio too long / no speech** | Transcription couldn't find usable speech | Check the audio plays back; for music-heavy tracks, consider not indexing. |
| **Embed failed mid-batch** | Embedding provider hit a rate limit or 5xx | Pria retries automatically. If it keeps failing, **Reprocess Content → Re-embed**. |
| **Stuck in one phase** | A worker crashed mid-job | The sweeper re-queues stuck jobs automatically within \~90 seconds. If still stuck, **Reprocess Content → Full Re-extract**. |
| **Status: Error** | All retries exhausted | Open the preview to see the failure reason; try **Reprocess** or **Re-ingest from URL** if applicable. |
***
## Re-processing a file
Open the file's action menu and pick **Reprocess Content**. You get four modes:
| Mode | What it does | When to use |
| ------------------------------ | ----------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------ |
| **Re-embed** | Keeps the segments, regenerates embeddings | After changing the embedding model |
| **Full Re-extract** | Wipes everything, restarts from Extract | When extraction was wrong (bad PDF, OCR upgrade) |
| **Re-ingest from URL** | Re-downloads the source and runs the full pipeline | URL imports where the source changed |
| **Re-extract Knowledge Graph** | Re-runs the graph extractor against existing segments | When entity/relationship counts look off |
Re-ingest preserves the file's identifiers, so any links you shared keep resolving.
***
## Confidential files
Confidential is a per-file flag for **shared-vault** uploads (Instance or Account). When set:
* **Only you, the uploader, can open the file.** Other members — including admins — can't preview or download it; where its details would appear they see a "🔒 CONFIDENTIAL" marker instead.
* **Processing is unchanged.** Confidential files go through the same pipeline and stay indexed — their content can still inform the Digital Twin's answers for other members, but those members only ever see a short, redacted snippet in the retrieved-passages panel, never the document itself.
* **For you, everything works normally** — full citations, full preview, full retrieval in your own conversations.
You can toggle Confidential **before upload** (in the upload dialogue) or **any time after** (file action menu → Make Confidential / Make Public). See [What Confidential really means](/mdx/user-guide/files-documents/managing-files#what-confidential-really-means) for the full picture.
***
## Related
* [Managing Files](/mdx/user-guide/files-documents/managing-files) — uploading, organizing, and the file action menu
* [IP Vault](/mdx/user-guide/files-documents/ipvault) — vault overview and access tiers
* [Searching Inside Your Files](/mdx/user-guide/files-documents/file-search) — content search across the vault
* [Knowledge Modes](/mdx/user-guide/interface/knowledge-modes) — how processed files are used at chat time