Can I remove old documents from ingest folder but their content keeps saved in DB?

[neural-oracle]

Hi
I cannot find anywhere an explanation about following:
I ingested and processed 200 documents.
Now, before I ingest the next 200 documents I am not sure, if I can remove the old dokuments from the ingest folder. But after removing them I want to be sure that the processed contents stays in the embeddings and vector DB.
is that possible or do I have to keep all documents (old and new ones) always in the ingest folder?
In that case, Does the program recognize which documents have already been processed and which not?

Thx