Deletion Campaigns

Introduction

Deletion Campaigns are one-off activities, aimed at cleaning-up old datasets, which are no longer needed by the Physics community. The primary goal is to free up storage space at the CMS Tiers.

Organization

Each campaign has it's own Twiki page, where the list of datasets to be deleted are published, and a time-line for the actions is defined. Usually, after the publication of the initial list, physics coordinators request some datasets to be excluded from the campaign. These are listed in a separate table. When the list of deletions is finally agreed upon, the datasets are first DEPRECATED in DBS, so that no more physics analyses would attempt to use them. The datasets are still physically present at the Tier site at this stage. After a grace-period of about a week, in which people might realize they actually need some datasets, and want them restored, the datasets are actually deleted (except the ones which were requested to be restored, of course). The deletion is done by creating a list of datasets per Tier center, and issuing a single, large PhEDEX DeletionRequest per site. After the requests get approved by the site admins, and the deletions complete, we normally do a cross-check to verify that everything that was requested to be deleted is actually deleted. At that point the campaign is usually pronounced over, and finished.

List of current campaigns

List of aborted/incomplete campaigns

List of old, completed campaigns