# Delete old documents
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 7, 2020, 12:50am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591 "2020-11-07T00:50:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@smruthip](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/smruthip)
#### Post date: [November 7, 2020, 12:50am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591/1 "2020-11-07T00:50:56Z")
Is there a way to delete old documents based on a filed which has timestamp?
What I want to do is just keep the latest document per id
example
id. timestamp
1 1pm
1 2pm
1 3pm
1 4pm
2. 3pm
2. 4pm
2. 6pm
2. 7pm
I want to keep only the 4 pm document for id 1 and delete all the others, similarly for id 2, want to keep only 7pm document and delete all the rest.
Thank you!
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [November 7, 2020, 3:00am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591/2 "2020-11-07T03:00:22Z")
If you stored the hour of the day as a field in your document and have the id field as well, you can create a query to select those documents and make sure it works well using the search API.
Then use that query in a Delete By Query API call.
---
### Author:  [@smruthip](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/smruthip)
#### Post date: [November 7, 2020, 6:15am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591/3 "2020-11-07T06:15:53Z")
Thank you David. So I have a query to give me the most recent document for each id. Now I want to delete all the other documents for that id except the latest document. I am really new to Elastic search and not sure how the query will look like. Please could you guide me in the right direction?
{
"aggs":{
"top\_tags":{
"terms":{
"field":"id.keyword"
},
"aggs":{
"top\_sales\_hits":{
"top\_hits":{
"sort":[
{
"Time":{
"order":"desc"
}
}
]
}
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [November 10, 2020, 11:23am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591/4 "2020-11-10T11:23:46Z")
I believe you need to write some kind of a manual script to do that. Like getting all `_id` that needs to be deleted and call for each the DELETE document API?
But why you are in that situation? Why not using the `id` field of your document as the `_id` of the elasticsearch document?
In that case, anytime you are writing a new "version" of the document, a more recent version I mean, old version will be overwritten.
That way, there is nothing else to do.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [December 8, 2020, 11:23am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-old-documents/254591/5 "2020-12-08T11:23:52Z")
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