Are there best practices for archiving test output reports?

Question

I am using Katalon Studio for test automation. The reports are written to the disc. But, after a while, after many test suites are executed, the reports folder has grown to more than 40 GB. I would like to free up disc space by deleting reports that are, say, older than one or two months.

Is there a downside to this approach? If reports are not reviewed after a month, they are probably not that important, right?

EDIT:

I know the importance of reports varies between different organizations and clients. As far as my organization is concerned, my hands are pretty much free. However, I wouldn't like to do something rash now that I might regret in the future. That's why I reached out to more experienced testers in order to learn from other people's experiences.

Answer 1

I'm not sure how someone who doesn't work in your organization is supposed to know whether it's ok to delete a report after one or two months.

Ask someone you work with: a peer, or your boss, or maybe the people who use the reports.

Answer 2

Today's storage is incredibly cheap, so instead of agonizing over how long to keep stuff, just zip it and back it up. Or even just back it up. Save for 10 years. Done.

You have several options.

You can combine several of them as needed for your solution

• zip up (compress) older reports (will often save 90%+ of the space)
• backup older reports to an external hard drive
• backup older reports to solid state media such as zip drives - amazingly cheap now
• backup to the cloud through a desktop app, e.g. dropbox, unsyncing old years as needed
• backup to the cloud online through many other cloud backup services

With all of them you'll need at least some informal sense of how long you decide to keep stuff, whether to rotate, reuse media, how often to do the backups, etc. Whatever approach you choose may also influence how you organize files locally, e.g. by folders using year to break them out, e.g. 2015, 2016, 2017, etc. so you can then apply the above strategies. I've used year (and decade) folders for photos to cover the past 50 years. It lers me sync what I want using Dropbox selective sync.