Retention rules not working?

[Marcel Kleinlütke]

Hey there, 

we set the rentetion rules globaly to delete all trashed data after 6 months and a space specific rule to delete all attachment version after 6 month and all trash after 3 month and all page versions after 6 month.

We now recognized that not the global rule nor the space specific rule does anything.

Any idea why? What have I done wrong? What missed I?

[Humashankar VJ]

Hi @Marcel Kleinlütke 

Have you ever observed the retention rule executing successfully, even if it's not working currently, or has it never worked since its creation.

Best Regards

[Marcel Kleinlütke]

It has worked in between. But was never monitored.

we see that there are attachment versions that are not deleted in some spaces and we see that the same for page versions.

[Humashankar VJ]

Hi @Marcel Kleinlütke 

Thanks for the insight - To elaborate on this context.

The retention job, which runs every 10 minutes, deletes items in small batches of approximately 3,000 to minimize performance impact. As a result, it may take some time for all items to be deleted, particularly if you have a large amount of data.

Besides, known scalability issues with retention rules, which Atlassian plans to address later this year, could cause the process to be slower than expected. Furthermore, data integrity issues with pages or attachments can cause the retention job to fail, resulting in the entire batch being stuck and preventing further deletions.

To learn more:

Set retention rules to delete unwanted data | Confluence Data Center 8.5 | Atlassian Documentation

Associated Bug for your reference:

[CONFSERVER-87298] Soft and Hard Retention cleanup jobs take long time to run - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

Hope this helps - Happy to help further!!
Thank you very much and have a great one!
Warm regards

[Marcel Kleinlütke]

We can see that within scheduled jobs there is a soft and a hard version of version removal. Both had run before. The soft one was quiet fast the hard one took some more time - but there was no clear result that every version mathing the retention rules was deleted


The soft version took 00:04.048 and the hard one 01:33.524

[Humashankar VJ]

@Marcel Kleinlütke 

Just to confirm, are both the space-specific retention rules and the global rules still active at the same time?

Since space-specific rules override global ones, it's possible that the space-level settings are preventing the global cleanup from working as expected.

Regards

[Marcel Kleinlütke]

We tried both with and without space retention rules in both versions there are no effects. not a single version is deleted. not with space retention rules nor without them.

[Humashankar VJ]

Hi @Marcel Kleinlütke 

Thanks for the update, let me try to research on this a bit.

Regards

[Humashankar VJ]

Hi @Marcel Kleinlütke 

There may be instances where specific content or properties are processed differently by the system, I recommend submitting a support ticket to Atlassian for their guidance Atlassian Support

Best Regards