Schedule objects for deletion¶

To determine whether your Object Storage system supports this feature, see Manage objects and containers. Alternatively, check with your service provider.

Scheduling an object for deletion is helpful for managing objects that you do not want to permanently store, such as log files, recurring full backups of a dataset, or documents or images that become outdated at a specified time.

To schedule an object for deletion, include one of these headers with the PUT or POST request on the object:

X-Delete-At

A UNIX epoch timestamp, in integer form. For example, 1348691905 represents Wed, 26 Sept 2012 20:38:25 GMT. It specifies the time you want the object to expire, no longer be served, and be deleted completely from the object store.

X-Delete-After

An integer value which specifies the number of seconds from the time of the request to when you want to delete the object. This header is converted to a X-Delete-At header that is set to the sum of the X-Delete-After value plus the current time, in seconds.

Use the POST method to assign expiration headers to existing objects that you want to expire.

In this example, the X-Delete-At header is assigned a UNIX epoch timestamp in integer form for Mon, 11 Jun 2012 15:38:25 GMT.

$ curl -i publicURL/marktwain/goodbye -X PUT -H "X-Auth-Token: token" \
  -H "X-Delete-At: 1390581073" -H "Content-Length: 14" -H \
  "Content-Type: application/octet-stream"

In this example, the X-Delete-After header is set to 864000 seconds. The object expires after this time.

PUT /<api version>/<account>/<container>/<object> HTTP/1.1
Host: storage.example.com
X-Auth-Token: eaaafd18-0fed-4b3a-81b4-663c99ec1cbb
Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Delete-After: 864000