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Users cannot load an updated copy of a PDF on my website; they see a previous version of it.Help!

MisterSnrub
Registered: Sep 27 2010
Posts: 16
Answered

After saving and uploading a new version of a PDF file to my website, sometimes when browsing to that PDF in a web browser Adobe Acrobat will load the previous version (meaning the one that was there before I updated it). It's like Adobe Acrobat sees that the file the user is loading has the exact same name as one that was previously loaded on their system, so it just chooses to load that local one instead because it is obviously faster to load a local copy then a remote one. What I need is for Adobe Acrobat to download a new copy all the time. It appears the only way to force Adobe Acrobat to load the updated copy of the PDF is to rename the PDF filename when uploading it to my website. Unfortunately, this obviously necessitates all hyperlinks to that file be changed also, which is a pain. This problem appears no matter which browser the user uses, and clearing the browser's cache or private data or temporary internet files all have no effect. Even if the user right-clicks the file, saves the file to a local folder, browses to the file, then opens it in Adobe Acrobat, it will still load an old version. Please help!

My Product Information:
Acrobat Standard 10.0, Windows
try67
Expert
Registered: Oct 30 2008
Posts: 2398
Sounds like a problem with your web-server, not with Acrobat.
Try it on a computer where the previous version was never loaded. If the problem occurs there as well, the problem is with the file itself.

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UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
Accepted Answer
It's often seen on Apache servers with cache-control directives in the configuration file, as many standard implementations of that directive assume certain types of file (jpg, gif, PDF, etc) never change and so report an extremely-long cache timeout in the HTTP header. The proper solution is to correct the httpd.conf file on the server, but it will also re-scan if the server process is restarted.