Deleting outdated article versions - reasons not to?

[Barry_W]

Hi All,

I need to delete a large volume of knowledge articles from a specific knowledge base, but I'm retaining around 200 of these by moving newly created drafts of them to a different knowledge base. The old versions of these articles will be deleted with the rest.

Has anyone any experience of deleting old versions of articles (leaving just the most recently created draft) and in particular, reasons why I shouldn't do this?

The testing I've done suggests it shouldn't cause issues with the articles I wish to retain, but any voices of experience would be gratefully received!

Thanks,
Barry.

[Arnaldo]

Interesting question.
We have enabled versioning predominantly to ensure that improperly updated versions can be retrieved.
This guarantee is necessary because we have left the freedom to contribute to the quality of documents to all who access the DB.

We are evaluating the use of ServiceNow's Archiving mgmt tool.
The planned strategy would be to archive in obsolete documents, Retired or in draft status for more than three months
We then plan to hold them for another 3 months before permanently deleting them.
Data archiving (servicenow.com)