Cloning an entity with an Uploadable field from VichUploaderBundle

Question

I have a Symfony 6.2.6 application running on PHP 8.2.

What's the best way to clone an entity that has an Uploadable field?

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I have created a MediaObject class, using API Platform docs for reference:

#[Vich\Uploadable]
#[ORM\Entity]
class MediaObject
{
    #[ORM\Id, ORM\Column, ORM\GeneratedValue]
    private ?int $id = null;

    #[ApiProperty(types: ['https://schema.org/contentUrl'])]
    public ?string $contentUrl = null;

    #[Vich\UploadableField(mapping: "media_object", fileNameProperty: "filePath")]
    public ?File $file = null;

    #[ORM\Column(nullable: true)]
    public ?string $filePath = null;

// ...
}

The MediaObject is then in turn linked to multiple entities using Many to Many relationships.

My problem arised when I tried to clone an entity that has a Many to Many relationship with MediaObject. I used the myclabs/DeepCopy package, which did the trick. It created a copy of the MediaObject entity with the same filePath. Here's the problem:

Let's assume you have an Offer A, which is linked to MediaObject A (image.png). After cloning it, you now have an Offer B, which is linked to MediaObject B (image.png).

Once you delete one of the MediaObjects, the other remains intact, but the file is deleted on disk. This leads to data loss.

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What's the best way to approach this problem? I see two viable options:

1. Cloning the file on disk - would work, as copying in my use case isn't too frequent. For other use cases it might lead to overwhelming storage use.
2. Checking if MediaObjects exist prior to deleting - also would work, but I couldn't find how do I get this working for VichUploaderBundle. Would probably need an index on the filePath column.

I would appreciate input and/or code samples! Thanks in advance for your help.