Logs and Attachments - Retention and Archiving

Softrip's applications generate large amounts of log files and documents that can take up a considerable amount of space in your storage (whether a local drive or a file share).

This document describes Softrip's recommended best practices for maintaining, archiving, and deleting these files where appropriate.

Note that these are Softrip's standard recommendations, but your instance or company policies may have specific requirements that would extend the data retention period for logs and attachments.

Logs

Softrip's applications generate various types of logs, documented here with Softrip's recommended retention and archiving policy.

ResWebNext (SoftripNext reservations/CRM)

STServerService (SoftripNet Middle Tier)

STServerWeb (SoftripNext Middle Tier)

RServer (Softrip Resource Server)

Attachments (STNAttach, STNView)

STNAttach

Softrip's applications generate documents attached to a reservation or operational process. The vast majority of these files are "Revision Invoices", which are snapshots of a reservation's invoice after each committed change to the reservation.

These are typically stored in the STNAttach directory.

Softrip has an Attachment Archiver tool available for client IT teams. This tool moves attachments for a given reservation based on its departure date to a different location (for example, long-term off-site storage). Running this Archiver tool once a quarter helps ensure that the production STNAttach directory does not run out of disk space.

The Attachment Archiver tool is available for download here:

https://download.softrip.com/download/stn/STAttachmentArchiver.zip

Review the Settings.xml file and fill in the blanks for your environment to run the archiver and move old attachments to another drive.

To restore an archived attachment file, find the reservation's departure date directory and copy all files to the STNAttach directory. This will restore all archived attachments (invoice snapshots etc.) for that departure date, making those historical attachments available in the application.

For hosted clients, Softrip will keep up to 2 years' worth of Attachment files, based on reservation departure date. This means that if today’s date is 23 Feb 2023, attachments will be kept only for reservations that departed on or after 23 Feb 2021.

STNView

When a user views their Travel Documents or Invoice, a physical file render of that report is written to the STNView directory, and then served to the user's browser. These files are ephemeral and should be deleted daily. Note that the STNView directory may contain a global.asax file (and an associated web.config file) which controls access and permissions to these document renders. These files should not be deleted when deleting STNView folder contents.

Softrip recommends clearing the content of the STNView directory once a day, ensuring that the global.asax and web.config are not deleted (if present).