Archiving the Archive Data

[KeithF]

(-or- A short visit to the Department of Redundancy Department, or "It's basically turtles all the way down")

During a recent discussion about data retention policies, I foolishly mentioned that I've set our (self-hosted) ServiceNow production instance to archive off old records (Incidents, Requests, etc.) after a calendar year, and that I was planning to start purging the archives as they were starting to get a bit large-ish.

(Not my brightest move, but in my defense I hadn't been properly caffeinated yet.)

One of our Information Assurance professionals grabbed onto that particular fact and spun up.  He's concerned that all of that "what we did and when" stuff will vanish forever and no one will know when a certain account was created, when a password was reset, when a user had their hand held, etc. He doesn't see a difference between system audit data (which we retain for a set extended period due to regulations) and Incidents sorted out three years ago. 

He'd like me to dump the archived table(s) to... uh... another archive.  Not indexed or live, just a flat-file repository of stuff that could be picked through if needed. 

Like I said, a little crazy but I have to humor him because being the policy wonk he is, he'll fill my life with misery and woe otherwise.  I've checked the documentation and, while there's stuff related to how to archive and purge records, there's not anything relevant exporting the contents of an archive table to XML or the like before deletion.  Any ideas or suggestions from the Community would be most welcome.

TL;DR: Archive data is purged eventually and someone would like to retain it further in an off-line kind of way.  Any ideas on how to write out Archive tables to XML?

Cheers,

Keith Fogle

[bammar]

Well - #1 - I would say if you have no adverse impact to the large archive tables i would keep them As long as possible in ServiceNow-

• Make the module links PREset to CREATED THIS WEEK - this way when they load they wont be huge and slow down your session
• Due to the rarity like you assume of people ever needing it- people wont go here much
• Balance how far back you typically need to go when running reports or researching recent tickets from end users then set your archive policy for those tables accordingly -  We assume a PW reset from 3 yrs ago has no utility today but for record keeping its good to have it- it cant hurt to keep it for liability as well as in certain industries that require 7 yrs

#2- If you really must extract the data from ServiceNow completely- You can as an admin go to archive table right click export to CSV, XLSX, but there are a few things to consider.

• Size of export- you may have to expand a system property to allow for an export of that size...
• You may have to piecemail the export data
• You can save it in a file repository your company has
• Right click export will get you all field data even if its not visible in your custom columns

So i would hold everything in ServiceNow aka new data in original tables - older data in Archive- then if the System was slow or you didnt have storage space or something- i would start peeling off the key  large oldest pieces of the archive tables- and i would never ever delete them- in some way the company would store them and preserve them. More because I dont want to loose the data /auditing/liability/ and less because someone once in a blue moon wants it.

Remember once its out of ServiceNow its much harder to report on. Also you can i beleive enable reporting on Archive tables... Also you can advise the other person we assume that if the data was import we already extracted that importance from previous reports aka - PW resets  last 3 months...

Set up more scheduled key reports that can be emailed out for reference later as a last 3 mth pw reset email from 2017- may have tickets in the archive but you got what u needed from them at that time...and can use those scheduled report emails for later reference too. So if you archive the archive maybe do all of the above excel and xml