BMC Helix ITSM data archiving

Archiving data is an essential step in data management. It provides a way to remove obsolete records from your production database using a regular, controlled, and predictable process. Archiving data also helps you to maintain system performance and to comply with your record retention policies. When designing an archive process:  

• BMC recommends storing no more than 24 months of inactive data in production.
• BMC recommends retaining no more than 5 years of data in archive forms.
• Consider your volume of data when selecting the frequency of the archiving schedule. Some customers may need to execute their archive job more frequently than others in order to better manage the amount of data archived each time. 

In-application archiving

You may use the in-application AR System Archive Manager console to configure a continuous archive job and extract and delete archive data as needed. Key tenets of the archive function include the following:

• The archiving process is available by default but you must configure the archiving schedule in order for the process to execute.
• You may perform an on-demand archive run against selected records at any time (with or without having an archive process scheduled).
• You may exclude individual records from the archiving process by selecting the Do Not Archive check box on a record with certain statuses (you must have update permissions to select this option).
• Each record type has its own archiving policy (record status criteria, default record age, and so on). You may customize the default record age.
• Archiving a parent record also archives all of its child records, regardless of their state.
• Related records, for example, a change request related to an incident, follow their individual record type's archiving policy.
• When you archive a record, it is removed from the production environment and sent to a set of corresponding archive forms (stored within your production database). Once archived, data cannot be copied back into the production forms.
• Archived data may be searched from the application by accessing the corresponding archive form. Archived data is moved to a form of a similar name with _Archive appended, for example, archived records from HPD:Help Desk may be viewed from HPD:Help_Desk_Archive.
• System administrators can access archived data by generating reports that can be run against the archive forms using BMC Helix Dashboards . For archived data, BMC recommends looking at aggregated reports instead of looking at each ticket. 
• Archived data may be exported to comma-separated files (.csv) and/or permanently deleted from the archive tables by executing the System Archive Export function. Exports create a separate .csv file for each form. Archive export files may be obtained from BMC SaaS Operations upon request. Files will be available for download via the File transfer process.

What is archived

The Archiving feature archives transactional data for the following BMC Helix ITSM applications and components:

• BMC Change Management
• BMC Knowledge Management
• BMC Service Desk
• BMC Service Request Management
• Approval
• Task
• BMC Remedy AR System email messages

The following record types are not archived:

• BMC Requester console records
• Foundation data (for example, organizations and locations)
• Process setup data (for example, incident management templates)