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Solution for automated trash purging?

Daniel Hertrich

Hi there,

is there some Confluence plugin or another solution (or way) to purge pages from the confluence trash bin after a specific amount of time (trash date + x days)?

Are there *any* ways to automate permanent deletion dependent on criteria such as "trashed" date, "created" date etc.?

Thank you!

Accepted answers

All comments

Aron Gombas _Midori_

You can empty trash periodically using the ScriptRunner app, as explained here.

As for emptying only certain pages from the trash, I don't think you can do that. It is "nothing or all".

If you need more sophisticated page lifecycle tracking (based on last modification, last view, manual markers, etc.) and automated archival, check out the Archiving Plugin.

Daniel Hertrich

Thank you Aron, I'll have a closer look at the Archiving Plugin. It looks very useful on first glance.

Daniel Hertrich

I looked into a possible solution using the Archiving Plugin, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Problem: We needed a two-step workflow:

Step 1: User archives a page manually by assigning the "archive" tag OR a page is archived autoimatically by specific filter crieteria (OK, will work).

Step 2: The Archiving Plugin scans its own archive space to permanently delete all pages that are older than 90 days. (that one won't work)

However, Step 2 doesn't seem to be possible, as the Archiving Plugin is not able to use its own Archive spaces as input. Even after making such spaces visible by changing their status from "Archived" to "Current", the Archiving Plugin is not able to assign workflow rules to its own Archive spaces.
Or did I miss something?

Aron Gombas _Midori_

(NB. you should have been added your comment as a reply to my answer in the top, not as a new answer. Now the context is somewhat lost.)

So, permanent deletion is a primary requirement? So must the content go forever?

I am asking this, because our add-on is built more with the mindset of "archive this content, so that it becomes invisible, but when it is necessary, it can be searched through, it can be viewed, it can be restored". The motto is: "don't delete, archive instead as you can never know".

Daniel Hertrich

Oh sorry. WIll do the next time.

Yes, permanent deletion is a primary requirement.

Basically, the requirement for now is that if the user deletes a page, it should be recoverable for x days, but not visible to the normal user anymore and not available for standard searches. After those x days, it should be deleted permanently automatically. This has legal reasons is thus a hard requirement.

In my use case, when using your plugin, archiving would be kind of a workaround for the lack of an automated way to purge the trash bin in a way that a page is deleted from the trash "x days after it has been trashed".

I think your plugin could help in that situation, if it could two two more things:

- Apply archiving rules also to already archived pages, i.e. that an "... (Archive)" space would be (optionally) visible to the archiving rules form, even if the space is set to "Status = Archived" (which would be required, too, to avoid search matches from these archives)

- If there was an additional "Archiving strategy", that takes care that content is permanently deleted. Maybe don't call it "archiving" then. ;-) In some companies, there are such (legal) requirements. If you add such features to the plugin, it could be very valuable to such companies, especially since there doesn't seem to be another available solution yet.

Aron Gombas _Midori_

Thanks for elaborating the use case, Daniel!

Based on your explanation I created 2 public feature requests in our tracker and I encourage you to vote on these:

In addition to our product vision, user votes significantly affect the product roadmap.

Final note: I understand that the law requires you to permanently destroy content and that must go forever. But, those pages will be captured in Confluence backups and your database backups anyway. Is that compatible with the law?

Aron Gombas _Midori_

📣 UPDATE

We've just released the new “Purge” automation type in the Better Content Archiving app (originally mentioned back in 2017)!

This new feature lets you set up periodic purging based on a CQL query. As the name suggests, the Purge action permanently deletes content:

There’s no undo, so the feature is protected by a global setting that must be enabled by a Confluence admin before it can be used.

I hope this creates new opportunities for content retention and lifecycle management in general.

(Discl. this paid and supported app is developed by our team. Free for 10 users.)