cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

What does destroy do?

ghernando
Champ in-the-making
Champ in-the-making
With records management, when I select the 'destroy' action at the end of the lifecycle for a records, what happens to the file content that is destroyed?

I'm assuming that just a file system delete of the file occurs, something like the erasure of a pointer to a record (eg the file name and directory path) that tells the operating system where a particular piece of data is held on the medium. The actual data objects are gradually overwritten in time when new data and files are added to the system.

Is that right?  Has the data really been overwritten after a 'destroy' or is there still some chance that the data from the file might be retrievable?
1 REPLY 1

carlos_miguens
Champ on-the-rise
Champ on-the-rise
In the case of an ordinary Alfresco document when it is deleted the node is deleted within the database and the content file is marked for deletion. It will remain on the system until it later gets deleted by a scheduled background job.

With records management when a record is deleted it is immediately deleted from the file system using a file system delete. The disk is not "scrubbed" to destroy the image on disk. A recovery tool could still potentially recover the file or part of the file.

If this is of concern you could either extend the server to do this or employ an external security tool that would do this.