Retention of files
Nextcloud’s Files Retention app allows to automatically delete files that are tagged with a collaborative tag and have a certain age.
Example
After installing the Retention app as described in Apps management navigate to Administration settings and then to Flow.
The rule from the example will delete all files tagged with Temporary file
14 days after the creation.
You can also use the “Notify owner a day before a file is automatically deleted” option to make sure the file owner will get a notification before a file will be deleted.
Common misconfigurations
Public collaborative tag
Similar to Files access control retention should use restricted
or invisible
tags. Otherwise any user can remove the tag and the file is not removed after the given
period. Use Automated tagging of files to assign such tags to newly uploaded files.
File age
Currently retention is based on the creation date of the file. The sync client sends
the original creation date to the server, while uploading through the web interface
will create a new file with a new creation date.
We hope to be able to add a upload date
to the filesystem soon, which would make more
sense. Until then this potentially unexpected behavior has to be taken into account.