ECS 3.6.2 Data Access Guide

Retention

The ECS S3 head supports retention of objects to prevent them being deleted or modified for a specified period. The ECS S3 is an ECS extension and is not available in the standard S3 API.

Retention can be set in the following ways:

Retention period on object

Stores a retention period with the object. The retention period is set using an x-emc-retention-period header on the object.

NOTE: The objects retention period can be extended. See Extending retention period on objects for more information.

Retention policy on object

A retention policy can be set on the object and the period that is associated with the policy can be set for the namespace. The retention policy enables the retention period for a group of objects to be set to the same value using a policy and can be changed for all objects by changing the policy. The use of a policy provides much more flexibility than applying the retention period to an object. In addition, multiple retention policies can be set for a namespace to allow different groups of objects to have different retention periods.

When applying a retention policy to an object using a x-emc-retention-policy header on the object, the policy retention period must be set. The ECS administrator must set the policy retention period from the ECS Portal or using the ECS Management REST API.

Retention period on bucket

A retention period that is stored against a bucket sets a retention period. The retention period is set for all objects with the object level retention period or policy that is used to provide an object-specific setting, where a longer retention is required. The retention period is set using an x-emc-retention-period header on the bucket.

When an attempt is made to modify or delete the object, the larger of the bucket retention period or the object period is used to determine whether the operation can be performed. The object period is set directly on the object or using the object retention policy.

S3 buckets can also be created from the ECS Management REST API or from the ECS Portal and the retention period for a bucket can be set from there.