Overview of Lifecycle Rules

Lifecycle rules enable you to automate and manage expiration of files or objects in the Element Store. They are implemented through the S3 API. However, they can be used to manage the expiration of any data created and accessed as files via any supported client protocol as well as any data that was created as S3 objects.

A lifecycle rule defines expiration actions that are applied to a scope of objects within a bucket. They can expire objects a number of days after they are created, abort and remove incomplete multipart uploads, and cleanup expired object delete markers that can accumulate in versioned buckets. Each rule is defined for a specified scope of objects within a specified view. The scope can be defined by object prefix and/or object size.

This feature is supported for versioned and non versioned S3 bucket views. In other words, in order to leverage this feature for any given view, you will need to enable the S3 bucket protocol on the view even if you are not using S3 as a client protocol and you are not creating any of your data as S3 objects. As long as the view is enabled as an S3 bucket, lifecycle rules will apply to any files and directories created by any protocol as well as to objects that were created as such via S3.