Purging data (retention scheduling)

geseronta

Good day, I looked at the forums at couldn't find a fully documented solution for this. Our privacy office is demanding all units begin following retention scheduling policies, which means purging PII and user records after X years. Is there a documented way to purge tickets older than X days (or years)? We are not the best at SQL queries, if someone had something that purge all tickets and associated data, we could customize the timeframes and even categories we want to clobber. But we are not experts on joining tables, nor do we know which tables need to go 🙁

KevinTheJedi

geseronta

No, there is no automated way however you can make Advanced Searches with the criteria you need like “Tickets created before 2025-01-01” and then do “Select All”, and then Delete. This is per-page so you’d need to do this page-by-page. If you have thousands of records this could take quite a while.

We do have data archiving as a planned enhancement after v2.0 is established so stay tuned!

Cheers.

geseronta

Thanks KevinTheJedi, do you know of a way to do this with MySQL queries? We do indeed have 10s of thousands of tickets a year, so page by page would be a nonstarter. I saw another thread that did this, but it would only delete the ticket itself, not associated data.

KevinTheJedi

geseronta

It's going to be virtually impossible via the database as you have to think about so many relations, etc. I mean just think about the attachments (files) that can be attached to each entry; some are even inline within the content HTML, etc. which you'd need to manually lookup each time. If you delete a file that's being referenced somewhere you'll get endless errors, Tickets not loading, etc. There are many more nuances to think about and to account for that it's never, ever recommended. Basically, deleting records manually via the database is literally the worst thing you can do.

Cheers.

geseronta

Understood and message received, we can push back on privacy with his information so I appreciate the quick response! KevinTheJedi