The retention period for archived data in the repository depends on several factors:

• How is the data to be used?
• Is the data required to satisfy audits, and if so, how many years of data do the auditors need?
• Is it to be used for billing purposes?
• How many years worth of data are required to meet requirements?

There are two maintenance options for deleting data:

• Recurring Schedule. You can delete data, based on a specified number of months ranging from 1 to 99. In this case, you can create a recurring maintenance schedule to delete the data for one or more of the Reporting Servers that archive logs to the same database repository.

  In the following image, a list of all the Reporting Servers that are archiving logs to the same Resource Analyzer repository display. The schedule is set up to delete data older than 36 months for all the Reporting Servers.

  

  Clicking Next brings up the Scheduling User Interface described in Setting Up Scheduled Jobs to Archive Logs. A schedule can be created to delete older data based on scheduling options.

• One-time Option. You can delete data within a fixed date range. This is a one-time option.

  You can specify a start and end date to delete data within a specific date range, as shown in the following image.

  Note: The one-time option may be combined with the recurring schedule in a future release.