# Uploading to Reference Artifacts

**URL:** <https://community.wandb.ai/t/uploading-to-reference-artifacts/8550>\
**Category:** W&B Help\
**Tags:** artifacts\
**Created:** [December 8, 2024, 10:19pm UTC](https://community.wandb.ai/t/uploading-to-reference-artifacts/8550 "2024-12-08T22:19:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![jack89roberts](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/fbc32d/32.png) [@jack89roberts](https://community.wandb.ai/u/jack89roberts)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2024, 10:19pm UTC](https://community.wandb.ai/t/uploading-to-reference-artifacts/8550/1 "2024-12-08T22:19:31Z")

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I’ve been trying external reference artifacts for the first time, and am I right in thinking WandB will not handle uploading files to external stores? So I can use reference artifacts to link to pre-existing files/folders on S3/GCS/Azure blob, and I can then use WandB to download those files from the external stores once they’ve been linked to a reference artifact, but I can’t create/upload them with WandB to begin with - they must already exist on S3/GCS/Azure blob?

Or if it is meant to be possible to do the upload with WandB I’m struggling to get it to work with an Azure Blob - it looks for pre-existing files, doesn’t find any, and adds no references to the artifact.