This chapter gives you helpful information about retention periods and the deletion of documents.

Definitions

A document contains properties and document versions. A document version contains only useful files (the original application file and dependent files).

Retention period

The retention period describes the minimum storage time of a document in d.3ecm before it may be deleted.

It is configured in d.3 admin per document type in months. When a new document is imported, the expiry date of the term is determined and assigned to the document. If new versions of this document are created, the expiry date of the term for the document is also redetermined. In the case of transfer to a secondary storage facility, the expiry date is supplied.

If a "perpetual" retention period has been configured for a document type, no expiry date is stored for the document. However, when transferring to a secondary storage, an expiry date of "import plus 50 years" is passed in this case.

If event-oriented deletion has been configured for a document type, the retention period configured for this begins when an event is triggered later. This event is triggered via the d.3 server scripting api function document_start_lifetime per document. In this case, no expiry date is stored when a document is imported. An expiry date of "import plus retention period" is set when transferring to the secondary storage.

If the retention period is specified by a key date, a large number of documents can accumulate on one day when "deleting via d.3 async by moving them to the recycle bin" (see below). For more information on the processing speed of d.3 async, see the documentation d.3 batch.