Cleaning up orphaned content (purge)

The contentStoreCleaner bean identifies and deletes the orphaned content. In the default configuration, the contentStoreCleanerTrigger calls the contentStoreCleaner bean.

<bean id="contentStoreCleaner" class="org.alfresco.repo.content.cleanup.ContentStoreCleaner" >
     ...
     <property name="protectDays" >
        <value>14</value>
     </property>
     <property name="stores" >
        <list>
           <ref bean="fileContentStore" />
        </list>
     </property>
     <property name="listeners" >
        <list>
           <ref bean="deletedContentBackupListener" />
        </list>
     </property>
  </bean>

• protectDays

  This property specifies the minimum time that content binaries should be kept in the contentStore.

  In the above example, if a file is created and immediately deleted, it will not be cleaned from the contentStore for at least 14 days. The value should be adjusted to account for backup strategies, average content size, and available disk space. Setting this value to zero will result in a system warning as it breaks the transaction model. Also, it is possible to lose content if the orphaned content cleaner runs while the content is being loaded into the system. If the system backup strategy is just to make regular copies, then this value should be greater than the number of days between successive backup runs.

• store

  This property displays a list of ContentStore beans to scour for orphaned content.

• listeners

  This property specifies the listeners, which are notified when an orphaned content is located.

  In the above example, the deletedContentBackupListener copies the orphaned content to a separate deletedContentStore. Note that this configuration will not actually remove the files from the file system but rather move them to the designated deletedContentStore, usually contentstore.deleted. Once an appropriate backup has been performed, the files can be removed from the deletedContentStore via script or cron job.