Recordings are created on demand or by policy (Auto-Recording feature), and may need to be preserved indefinitely by some customers. This is supported in the v13.0 and later product by setting the Recording > Limits > Automatically delete sessions older than setting to 0, which prevents recordings from “aging out”. (Note that the max value of this setting is 87600 hours = 10 years, which should accommodate most retention policies – if the policy is over 10 years, then “keep these forever” is a reasonable setting.)
Recordings of Transient Hosts are associated with a “Recordings of” pseudo-host, by transient type:
Recordings on <Servername> (for RDS Hosts)
Recordings of Host on Demand
Recordings of Load Simulator Hosts (for LoadSim instances)
Recordings of Host for VDI (for VDI Hosts)
Recordings of installed (non-transient) Hosts are associated with the Host workstation record itself.
Given all of this, recordings can be deleted/lost in one of a few ways:
When a (non-transient) Host is deleted, the recordings associated with that Host are deleted.
When a “Recordings of” pseudo-Host is deleted, the recordings associated with that pseudo-Host are deleted.
Recordings can be discovered and deleted manually (assuming user has rights to do so).
Data Retention Settings
The "Automatically delete session" setting from the Recoridng > Limits settings section in previous versions of PC-Duo Web Console is now configured in the "Data Retention" section.
Additionally, a new setting “Prevent recordings from being deleted except by automatic deletion policy” that is Yes/No (or On/Off). The default setting is “off” but when turned “on”, the following functional changes take effect:
The ability to manually delete a recording is restricted – by global security blanket policy, the “delete session” access right is disallowed.
The “Recordings of” pseudo-hosts cannot be deleted (unless there are no recordings associated with them).
When a Host is deleted, any recordings associated with the Host are reassigned to a new pseudo-Host named “Recordings of Unavailable Hosts”. This is a database update to set the “WorkstationId” property of the session record to the pseudo-host ID.
Failsafe: the periodic tasks session cleanup routine, which deletes session records of deleted sessions, should also reassign session records with a valid PRXREC file to the “Recordings of Unavailable Hosts” item rather than deleting the record.
With these changes, session records can and will be deleted under very specific circumstances:
1. The periodic tasks session cleanup routine will delete session records if the PRXREC file is deleted or missing. Note that a basic connectivity check will be done on a per-volume basis to avoid deleting sessions if the volume that the recordings are on is “merely” offline at the time we run this task.
2. Even with “Prevent Recordings from being deleted” ON, the automatically delete session policy operates, and deletes session and PRXREC files that age out. Note well that this is skipped if this value is zero. This allows this setting to be set to something long – e.g. 1, 5, or 7 years – and old recordings are (eventually) deleted.
