Considerations for Archiving Processes

This page helps Appian developers decide what to consider before archiving or deleting completed process instances.

How archiving processes works

After a process instance is completed or canceled, Appian can archive the instance depending on the configuration of the process model object.

You can still view the history of an archived process instance in the Process Activity tab under the Monitor view for auditing purposes.

You can also unarchive or permanently delete an archived process in the Process Management page in the Admin Console.

Determine data retention needs

Archive your process instances if the following are true:

• The process data and metadata must be retained after completion for organizational purposes.
• Legal or regulatory requirements mandate recovery options like unarchiving.

Consider your organization's storage requirements

Archiving processes frees space in the Appian databases, but archive files remain on disk. Process archives can provide an audit trail of process execution, but you must implement this audit trail with careful consideration of your organization's storage requirements Retaining every archive file can be costly in disk-space usage.

Deleting processes frees maximum space in your environment. Nothing is retained in the Appian databases or on disk. If you need an audit trail, none is preserved.

Consider data dependence and scheduling for subprocesses

Setting an archive or deletion interval on a subprocess is the same as setting one for any other process. Archiving or deleting a subprocess has these additional considerations:

• Parent process data: When setting an archive or deletion interval for completed subprocesses, take care not to remove data that a parent process needs before the parent process completes or before all reporting requirements are met.
• Separate schedules: If you need to archive or delete a subprocess on a different schedule than its parent process, you might need to redesign the subprocess so that the subprocess passes all data back to the parent process.

Consider alternate ways to preserve report data

Archiving a process frees system memory, but it impacts your reports. The data in an archived process is no longer available for reporting purposes.

If you need to keep process data after a process is archived or deleted, store the data in a separate location before archiving or deletion removes it:

• Map the process data to a separate reporting process, or export the process data to a relational database management system (RDBMS).
• For key performance indicators that must be reported on historically, create a separate process to store this information.

Process archives contain a large amount of execution history that becomes unnecessary overhead when you perform business-activity reporting.

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