Removing documents

Documents expire (are eligible for removal) because their disk expiration date or archive retention period has passed. Expired documents can then be removed by the storage managers. The disk storage manager identifies documents for removal by using the application group's expiration information. The archive storage manager marks documents for removal based on the criteria defined in the migration policy.

Documents expire from disk when they reach their disk expiration date. If a document's disk expiration date is less than its Life of Data period, then the document is simply removed from disk storage. Subsequent requests for the document are satisfied by the archive storage manager. When the document reaches its Life of Data period, information about it is removed from the IBM® Content Manager OnDemand database (the document can no longer be retrieved). When the document's archive retention period has passed, information about it is removed from the archive storage manager database.

Because a document is eligible to be removed does not mean that it will be deleted from storage. The disk storage manager does not delete expired documents from storage until expiration processing runs. During expiration processing, the archive storage manager deletes information about expired documents from its database. However, the actual documents may remain on archive media until such time that the media on which they reside is reinitialized.

Important: The disk storage manager and the archive storage manager delete documents independently of each other. Each uses its own criteria to determine when documents expire and should be removed from the system. Each uses its own utilities to remove documents. However, for final removal of documents from the system, you should specify the same criteria to the disk storage manager and the archive storage manager. For more information on recommendations for storage management criteria defined in your application groups, storage sets, and migration policies, see Migrating documents.