Mass delete old versions of a KM resource

[Former Member]

Hello,

is there any danger when deleting old versions of resources by directly deleting the content of the /~system/versions folder?

Does this affect somehow the data integrity?

Are there other options to mass-delete versions?

Background is, that we want to clean up some of our tests systems and we have 5GB of old versions which we want to get rid of.

Any help is appreciated

Kind regards,

Christopher

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

You should not do on this way.

If you need to delete old documents version, you can disable versioning feature. In the folder, context menu->details->setting->versioning. As you are going to disable all versioning will be deleted.

After that you can enable again.

Patricio.

[Former Member]

I am facing a similar problem.  We do a lot of Information Broadcasting.  We have literally thousands of old BEX reports that we don't need taking up space.  I tried using Toolbox/Reports/Mass Operations/Delete.  It didn't just remove the versions.  It killed the whole object.  Is there any functionality that would let you keep only 5 or 10 previous versions and wipe out the rest in a mass operation?  Right now, we are reduced to deleting the bigger ones manually, which is ridiculous.  In a Unix environment, for example, you can set up patterns of retention by age.  I haven't found any way to do it on the KM versions in the portal.  Did SAP really leave out something so obvious?  Help!

[Former Member]

Hi Christopher,

In <b>CM repositories</b> the repository implementation will allow you to delete resources or hierarchies below <i>/<prefix>/._system/versions</i>. This will not bring the repository in an undefined state and it will stay operational.

Every version history to some versioned resource has a RID like this: <i>/<prefix>/._system/versions/<number>/<number>/<ID></i>. If you delete this version history manually, then the versioned resource itself will become non-versioned. This is a side effect of deleting the version history.

So if you delete everything below <i>/<prefix>/._system/versions/</i> then you will end up with a repository where all of the resources are still present, but none of them is versioned.

<b>This is not a recommended way to disable versioning !</b> Nevertheless, it works. And you might decide to use this approach on test systems. I strongly recommend not to do this on production systems.

If you disable versioning via <i>IResource.enableVersioning(false)</i>, then be sure that the configuration flag <i>keepVersionHistory</i> is set to false. Otherwise the versions will stay.

Best regards,

Michael

[Former Member]

Hi Michael,

thanks for your advice. We tried to delete the resources under /_sytems/versions/ but received an error message that we would not have the necessary permissions to do so. But we tried it with a system principal account. Do you have any idea what could be the reaosn for this?

Best regards,

Christopher

[Former Member]

Hi Christopher,

The version history folders (/<prefix>/._system/versions/<number>/<number>/<ID>) inherit the permissions from the versioned resource where this version history belongs to. It seems that there were in fact some resources that you were not allowed to delete.

Are you sure that you were logged in as administrator?

What kind of security manager is configured on your repository? I just tried the AclSecurityManager and this one allows an administrator to delete any resource. But I don't know how e.g. W2kSecurityManager behaves in this situation.

My best hint is, have a look at the permissions of the resources in your repository.

Hope this helps,

Michael

[Former Member]

Hi,

I just checked it again. The user account we use for testing is a system principal with all privileges. The repository we use is a CM Repository which uses the AclSecurityManager.

Hmm.....don´t know how to proceed. Anway, we decided to also delete the original resources in the meantime, thus it´s not of so much importance anymore.

But thanks for your great support.

Best regards and a nice weekend,

Christopher