Welcome > System > System settings > Database, retention and reporting > Retention policy

Retention policy

Older and unused items must be removed from the system to prevent unnecessary database growth.

Retention policies can automatically assist in minimizing the database size. By default, the system does not provide any retention policies, and therefore all artefacts are retained indefinitely in the database unless they are manually removed.

Defining the retention period and the number of versions to retain for certain items helps in cleaning up unused items, managing database growth, and optimizing performance.

See Configure the retention policy.

Also see Retention policies in Kofax TotalAgility Best Practices Guide.

Version based retention

By default, all versions are retained. You can optionally retain a number of major versions of forms, processes (including skins), business rules, classification groups and extraction groups. For example, retain last 15 versions of a process.

For Custom retention, default is last 10 versions and minimum is 1 version.

Note

  • A process version cannot be deleted if there is any job based on it (live or finished).

  • When a classification group or extraction group is removed, the project needs to be removed from Transformation Designer.

  • The extraction group can be removed even if there are documents that reference it. Therefore, there is no need to check existing documents.

Time based retention

By default, items are retained indefinitely. You can configure the custom retention period.

The retention period is the number of days, months or years for which an item can be retained. Once the retention period is over, the item is automatically removed from the database.

You can define the retention period for the following:

  • Internal users: Where the end date is greater than the retention period.

  • External users: Where the end date is greater than the retention period.

  • Audit log entries: Where the date logged is greater than the retention period.

  • Documents: Where the LastAccessedAt date is greater than the retention period. After document deletion, if there are no documents left within folder hierarchy, the retention policy also deletes the root folder. The retention policy does not delete Online Learning folders or their subfolders.

  • Folders: Where the LastAccessedAt date of the root folders is greater than the retention period (the value from document retention is used) and if the folder hierarchy does not contain any documents, and the folder hierarchy does not contain locked folders. The retention policy does not delete Online Learning folders or their subfolders.

    Note The retention policy does not delete the subfolders separately; they are deleted as part of root folder that matches the retention policy.

  • KCM packs: Where the created date is greater than the retention period.

You can configure the retention period for a specific process to get jobs purged by the Retention Policy system task. The retention period defined at the process level takes precedence over the system settings.

See Retain indefinitely under History, reporting and execution.

Document based retention
By default, the documents are retained indefinitely. You can configure the custom retention period.

When the retention period runs:

  • For all document types that do not have specific retention settings, the general retention behavior based on “Last Access Time” timestamp and on the time period set in system settings is used.

  • For all document types with a specific setting to use Last Access Time or Finished Time, the retention policy deletes the document based on the settings configured for latest version for that specific document type.

  • If the retention policy deletes all documents from the root folder, the root folder is also deleted.

  • The Root folder is deleted if it has no documents (even with empty subfolders) and its Last Access Time is older than the general retention period configured for the documents. The online learning folders are not deleted during retention policy execution.

Retention process execution
The Retention Policy system task handles deleting items from the database.

Retention policy always deletes all the documents found, that are ready for deletion. It splits these documents into chunks according to the "Default retention chunk size" setting. A single TotalAgility system task executes a chunk of documents. This is needed as the time limit for the single system task is five minutes. For example, if you have huge hierarchies with a lot of data, system task may fail to delete the default 250 documents within 5 minutes. In such case, the chunk size can be decreased. The less this number is, the more system tasks are created, or vice versa.

See Configure the retention policy