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Object versioning

Contributors netapp-lhalbert netapp-pcarriga
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You can set the versioning state of a bucket if you want to retain multiple versions of each object. Enabling versioning for a bucket can help protect against accidental deletion of objects and enables you to retrieve and restore earlier versions of an object.

The StorageGRID system implements versioning with support for most features, and with some limitations. StorageGRID supports up to 10,000 versions of each object.

Object versioning can be combined with StorageGRID information lifecycle management (ILM) or with S3 bucket lifecycle configuration. You must explicitly enable versioning for each bucket. When versioning is enabled for a bucket, each object added to the bucket is assigned a version ID, which is generated by the StorageGRID system.

Using MFA (multi-factor authentication) Delete is not supported.

Note Versioning can be enabled only on buckets created with StorageGRID version 10.3 or later.

ILM and versioning

ILM policies are applied to each version of an object. An ILM scanning process continuously scans all objects and re-evaluates them against the current ILM policy. Any changes you make to ILM policies are applied to all previously ingested objects. This includes previously ingested versions if versioning is enabled. ILM scanning applies new ILM changes to previously ingested objects.

For S3 objects in versioning-enabled buckets, versioning support allows you to create ILM rules that use "Noncurrent time" as the Reference time (select Yes for the question, "Apply this rule to older object versions only?" in Step 1 of the Create an ILM rule wizard). When an object is updated, its previous versions become noncurrent. Using a "Noncurrent time" filter allows you to create policies that reduce the storage impact of previous versions of objects.

Note When you upload a new version of an object using a multipart upload operation, the noncurrent time for the original version of the object reflects when the multipart upload was created for the new version, not when the multipart upload was completed. In limited cases, the noncurrent time for the original version might be hours or days earlier than the time for the current version.
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