5.5. Setting a Retention Policy

You can set retention policies on a per-cluster basis. You must specify the amount of time to retain data before deletion.

Falcon kicks off the retention policy on the basis of the time value you specify:

	Note
	When a feed is successfully scheduled, Falcon triggers the retention policy immediately regardless of the current timestamp or state of the cluster.

To set a retention policy, add the following lines to your feed entity for each cluster that the feed belongs to:

<clusters>
        <cluster name="corp" type="source">
            <validity start="2012-01-30T00:00Z" end="2013-03-31T23:59Z"
                      timezone="UTC" />
            <retention limit="$unitOfTime($n)" action="delete" /> <!--Retention policy.  --> 
        </cluster>
 </clusters>

Where limit can be minutes, hours, days, or months and then a specified numeric value. Falcon then retains data spanning from the current moment back to the time specified in the attribute. Any data beyond the limit (past or future) is erased.