Data Management

Understanding soft-deletion, purging, and configuration in Zep

You are viewing the Zep Open Source v0.x documentation. This version is no longer supported, and documentation is provided as a reference only.

The current documentation for Zep Community Edition is available here.

Soft-deletion and Purging

When records are deleted in Zep, they are initially marked as soft-deleted by updating their deleted_at field with the deletion datetime. These records remain in the database but are considered deleted for application purposes.

By default, Zep executes a purge process every 60 minutes to perform hard deletes on these soft-deleted records. This means that soft-deleted records will be permanently removed from the MessageStore.

Purge Configuration

Administrators can modify the purge interval or disable the purge process entirely by editing config.yaml or setting the ZEP_DATA_PURGE_EVERY environment variable.

  • Set purge_every to the desired number of minutes between each purge. For example, to change the interval to 120 minutes, set the purge_every value to 120.
  • To disable the process altogether, set purge_every to 0 or leave undefined. In this case, the purging process will not run, and soft-deleted records will not be hard-deleted automatically.