How does plan branches interact with "keep X builds"?

Question

I'm looking into cleaning up some older artifacts to make the virtual instance easier to manage and to avoid having to expand hard drive space. The natural solution is to set up automatic deletion of artifacts after a certain time but always keep the X latest ones. The problem is that I'm not sure how this interacts with the different branches in the plan.

If I set it to keep 30 builds, will it keep 30 in trunk and 30 in each branch or will it keep the most recent 30 builds regardless of what branch they belong to? Optimally I would want to always keep branched builds forever as these are the ones that I have deployed in production at various times.

Marcin Gardias · Accepted Answer

It's 30 builds for each branch. Also, you can prevent Bamboo from deleting selected results by labeling them and configuring that label in Build Expiry options.

Last not least: if you want branch results to be kept forever, make sure they will not be deleted by automatic branch management, as it deletes entire branches, complete with all their results. Simply turn off (or don't turn on) the option if all your branches are like this. Alternatively, in Branch Details there's an option to exclude a branch from automatic management.