I use the Remote File module for a cck field displaying a remote image. It works with a known issue: images are reloaded on every edit http://drupal.org/node/395256
And as i do tests with lots of nodes and delete them afterwards, the images cached in filesystem become deleted too. Is there a way to tell filefield(?) not to delete them?
edit
Meanwhile found http://drupal.org/project/filefield_sources which works very nice on manually created or edited nodes. But there is no way to make filefield fetch the image on assigning the url to the place where it shows up when i let print_r($node) show it to me.
See also my post to this (wont-fix)issue http://drupal.org/node/590756#comment-2774472
Yes, there is.
You'd need to create an interface between your node and the file so when you delete the node, the file stays in place. Effectively, you're just deleting the association, not the file.
Perhaps this module saves to the files table and the reference to the file exists already.
You could develop a third party module that stores all your external files and has a GUI or some other interface to select them again for new nodes
Or, you could create a specific content type and save the files as separate nodes. Then you'd use node reference to join them.
Alternatively, the developer of that module says he'll add features if you pay him. However he does not guarantee it from what I can see :)