Trash Management Questions

[dkindlund]

Hi @tea-artist , my team has a bunch of trash related questions and I figured I'd ask them all here for easy cross-reference:

It seems like all delete operations on records just move the record into the corresponding table's "trash". As far as we can tell items remain in trash indefinitely. Currently, it seems the only way to empty the trash is through the Teable UI.

1. Is it possible to specify a max data retention of trash items per table? Meaning, auto-purge all trash items in Table A after 30 days; auto-purge all trash items in Table B after 90 days; ... etc...

If that's not possible, could at the bare minimum an auto-purge policy be enabled on a base level? Or space level?

2. What is the recommended way via the API to perform the same "empty trash" operation at a table level within the UI? We're not sure which API endpoints are responsible for "emptying the trash" and we see that it varies depending upon whether we are emptying the trash at the table-level, base-level, or space-level -- I hope you understand our confusion on this.

Thanks!

[tea-artist]

Hi @dkindlund
We currently have 5 levels of trash.

Space trash

List space trash

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/trash?resourceType=space
Request Method
GET

Permanent delete

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/space/{spaceId}/permanent
Request Method
DELETE

Base trash

List Base trash

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/trash?resourceType=base
Request Method
GET

Permanent delete

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/base/{baseId}/permanent
Request Method
DELETE

Table trash

Empty them all

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/trash/reset-items?resourceType=base&resourceId={baseId}
Request Method
DELETE

Table resouece trash

Include records fields views

Empty them all

Request URL
https://app.teable.ai/api/trash/reset-items?resourceType=table&resourceId={tableId}
Request Method
DELETE

Record history

The record modify history

Auto clean

At present, we haven't implemented any scheduled clearing of the trash. but we will add this feature in the future.

[dkindlund]

Thanks for the clarification, @tea-artist -- it makes sense. Using any of these APIs currently, is there any way to say "purge all trash items OLDER than 30 days"?

I think the answer is no, but I just wanted to confirm. Purging all items in the trash isn't ideal -- because some items might have been recently added to the trash -- I was looking more for a way to purge much older items in the trash after a set period of time.

Thanks again!

[dkindlund]

Update:
It looks like OAuth apps aren't able to use these APIs due to permissions issues.

I've described more details of the problem here:
#2018

As well as the subsequent PR for the fix, here:
#2020

[tea-artist]

Hi @dkindlund
We've recently implemented an automatic trash purge feature. Here's how it works:
Automatic Trash Cleanup
Default retention period: 30 days
Scan frequency: every 1 hour

Cleanup method: background scheduled task with batch processing (100 records per run)
Behavior for existing vs. new trash items:
Resources trashed after this feature is available: retention is calculated based on each resource's own deletedTime.
Resources already in trash before upgrading: the retention clock starts from when you first upgrade to the version that includes this feature.

Currently, this cleanup policy operates at the instance level

[dkindlund]

@tea-artist , this is perfect -- thank you! Long term, you may want to expose the retention period, scan frequency, and batch size as ENV variables, so that way they can be adjusted as needed. For example, if the Teable server experiences heavy load during certain hours, we could schedule trash purge operations to run during off-peak periods so that we're not straining the underlying DB.