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 requires up to 24 months of inactive data in all environments (non-production and production) to be archived.

• BMC recommends retaining no more than 5 years of data in archive forms.
  For steps to delete archive data, see Configuring and managing the archiving process in the BMC Helix Innovation Suite documentation.

Inactive Data: Closed or cancelled records. In the context of knowledge articles, it refers to historical versions of the article.  

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 defaults to a 24 months or lower archiving cycle. 

• You may perform an on-demand archive run against selected records at any time.

• Each record type has its own archiving policy (record status criteria, default record age, and so on). 

• 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.
• System administrators can access archived data by generating reports that can be run against the archive forms by using BMC Helix ITSM Archived Work Orders dashboard.
  For archived data, BMC recommends looking at aggregated reports instead of looking at each ticket. 
  For archiving attachments, BMC recommends that you archive the attachments by using the AR System Archive Manager console.
• 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. Files will be available for download via the File-transfer-process.

What is archived

The table below provides a complete list of out-of-the-box forms and their archiving policy. 

 What is purged

The table below provides a complete list of out-of-the-box forms that is purged and their deletion policy. These forms contain transient data, which refers to short-lived, session-based, and non-persistent data that is temporarily stored for backend processing purposes and does not contain any transactional, sensitive, or critical customer data.