Forms attachment purge

asked on May 19

Hello, I just discovered that a retention policy on forms attachments wasn't set under Data Maintenance. So old attachments haven't been purged in a long time.

Given the amount of data (a few years), would it be fine to just do a snapshot of the server and purge all the old attachments at once? Or should we do a bit at a time, reducing the number of days gradually? I'm not sure what the impact will be.
Once done, do we need to shrink the database after?
This is probably organization specific, but how many days do people typically retain their attachments for?

(I'm not a sys admin, so forgive me if these are dumb questions!) Any advice or best practices would be appreciated. Thank you!

0 0

SELECTED ANSWER

replied two days ago

You should have no problem configuring the age you want to keep and purging them all at once. I have done it many times.

I do not recommend shrinking your database unless you need the space. On demand data allocation has performance issues and spreads your data all over the disk. Ideally you want to allocate much more than your database size all at once on deployment to keep the data chunks close to each other on the platter although this may no longer be as relevant with solid state drive technology.

Attachments are not deleted until the set age after the process is complete. So retention entirely depends on how long you want users to be able to access attachments in their completed tasks. This means the retention plan for everyone is very different. Anywhere from 30 days to 3 years. You can always keep a hard copy in the repository for anything you need to keep for a long time.

For large environments I also recommend storing attachments to disk, configured in your Forms Configurator. Databases might be faster serving large files but the consistent access to large chunks of data could impact the performance of what the db engines are designed for, which is quick access to small chunks of data.

1 0

replied two days ago

Hi Chad. We've scheduled our first purge. I've set the age for a year initially, but we'll probably drop it to 90 days eventually. We found the "Add Volume" option for file storage under Forms Config. We're definitely going to use it. Thank you for the recommendation and the detailed answer!

0 0

Question

Question

Answer

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.