Retention Policy

What is a data retention policy?

Data retention policies concern what data should be stored or archived, where that should happen, and for exactly how long. Historic data that becomes irrelevant after a certain period will be cleared from the ARM database on a weekly basis. This way, ARM application performs faster, primary storage remains uncluttered, and at the same time the organization remains compliant.

How to change data retention policy?

Administrators can determine the age of the data that is still relevant for the company, and then make changes to the retention policy under the Admin > My Account > Retention Policy page.

Can the data retention policy be disabled?

No, Administrators won't be able to disable the data retention policy. Data retention policies greatly enhance data scan performance by removing outdated and duplicated data.

How can I access the data that has been cleared?

To access any historic data that has already been cleaned up, contact us at support@autorabit.com, and we will provide the data in a CSV file format.

For on-premise customers, the historic data is moved to the alt path in the .rabit folder (.rabit/dataretention/{org-name}).

Can the cleared data be restored to the application?

No. Deleted data cannot be restored to ARM under any circumstances.

Data from which pages is affected by this policy?

The following pages have historic data that is affected by the retention policy:

• Deployment history
• CI Job history
• Org Sync history
• EZ-Commits
  • EZ-Commits history
  • Prevalidation commits history
  • Reverted commits history
  • Merges history
  • Prevalidation merge history
• Merge Requests history
• External Pull Requests page
• Branching baseline page
• Change Labels page
  • Commit Labels
  • Release Labels
  • ALM Labels

I did not select the period for data retention. Will I lose everything?

No, you will not lose data if you did not set the retention period manually. The retention period is set to 12 months by default. When ARM version 22.3 is released, data older that 12 months is cleaned up. If you did not alter the settings, you will still have access to data up to 12 months old.

What if I change the retention period from 12 months to 3 or 6 months?

If you decrease the retention period from 12 months to 3 or 6 months, then at the time of next clean-up, data that is older than 3 or 6 months (whichever you have selected) will be cleaned up from the application and the rest will be retained.

What if I change the retention period from 3 months to 6 or 12 months, or from 6 months to 12 months?

If you increase the retention period from 3 months to 6 or 12 months, then data from the last 3 months will remain as it is, but data older than that will not be restored. Instead, for the next 3 or 9 months, respectively, no data will be deleted when the clean-up happens.

For example: If your retention period is set as 3 months, and you change it to 6 months on 1st April, then data from 1st January to 31st March is already retained. Now, from 1st April to 30th June the clean-up will still happen weekly as scheduled but no data will actually be deleted because nothing is older than 6 months. After 30th of June, some data will be more than 6 months old. This 6 months old data will be deleted at the next clean-up.

Similarly, if you change it from 6 months to 12 months, the above logic applies i.e. no data will be deleted during clean-up for next 6 months until the age of oldest data is 12 months or more.