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5. Documents lifecycle policy

Date: 2021-01-06

Status

Accepted

Context

We store documents in Amazon S3, which keeps a version history for each document. The latest version is always the one which is retrieved by the application, but older versions can be reinstated through the AWS interface.

We generally don’t use this versioning functionality, but it is used when a document is deleted. Rather than deleting the document outright, S3 adds a new “delete marker” version. This means that the original document can no longer be retrieved by the application but it could be reinstated.

To fulfil our data retention obligations, we need to permanently delete these documents from Amazon S3 including the delete markers and original versions.

Decision

Once a document has been given a delete marker, we will use Amazon S3’s lifecycle policies to automatically remove it after 1 day. This includes the delete marker and all previous versions.

Consequences

This process will make it completely impossible to recover documents 1 day after they’re deleted.

This page was last reviewed on 10 December 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 10 June 2025 by the page owner #opg-sirius-develop .
This page was set to be reviewed before 10 June 2025 by the page owner #opg-sirius-develop. This might mean the content is out of date.