# Deleting old versions

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-versions/4689>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Created:** [June 23, 2011, 8:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-versions/4689 "2011-06-23T08:45:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 3

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**Author:** ![Hari\_Shankar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/ad7895/32.png) [@Hari\_Shankar](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Hari_Shankar)\
**Post date:** [June 23, 2011, 9:08am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-versions/4689/3 "2011-06-23T09:08:45Z")

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Hi Clint,

Great.. I am basically case 1, but I saw that even though I don't specify  
any ID in the indexing request, es automatically creates a new id, e.g,  
version is increased to 2. But even after this, I saw that version 1 can be  
accessed. So you mean to say that it won't be always accessible, i.e, the  
version 1 will be visible for some time but will get removed automatically  
after some time?

Hari

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Clinton Gormley [clinton@iannounce.co.uk](mailto:clinton@iannounce.co.uk)wrote:

> Hi Hari
> 
> > How do you delete older versions of documents? Suppose I always need  
> > only the latest version, I wouldn't want to waste space storing the  
> > earlier versions as well.
> 
> One of three scenarios here:
> 
> 1. You are using the same ID for each version of the doc
> 
> In this case, each time you index a doc with the same ID, the old  
> version will be marked as deleted, and will no longer be visible.
> 
> These 'deleted' docs will be automatically removed at some point in the  
> future when the "segments" in your index are merged. This happens in  
> the background, but can be manually triggered using the optimize API.
> 
> 1. You are using different IDs for each version of the doc, or no ID, in  
> which case ES generates one for you.
> 
> In this case, you are out of luck. ES can only identify that one docs  
> is a different version of another doc by looking at the ID.
> 
> Instead, you would have to have some way of identifying which docs are  
> current, and which are old, and you can use the delete\_by\_query API to  
> mark the old ones as deleted.
> 
> 1. You have a rolling window
> 
> For instance, you're indexing log statements, and you want to have the  
> last week's data available to you, but automatically clear out anything  
> older.2
> 
> Easiest thing here would be to create a new index every day, eg  
> "logs\_2011-06-23" and only insert into today's index.
> 
> For querying, you could create an alias eg "logs\_week" which points to  
> "logs\_2011-06-23", "logs\_2011-06-22", etc
> 
> Then each day you would create a new index, update the alias, and delete  
> the index for $today-8 days
> 
> clint

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