Restoring Deleted Jobs in Deadline

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Version: 6.0 and later.

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever had the heart wrenching realization that you deleted something you should not have? Have you ever found yourself sweating and trembling as you move the mouse over to the recycling bin, only to come to the horrifying discovery that its only contents are some selfies you took earlier that did not properly capture your inner rock star?

Have you ever felt the same way after deleting one of your Deadline jobs? Fear not! Deadline has the ability to track deleted jobs and restore them, which can help you make sure you never accidentally delete your jobs again!

GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

When you delete a job in Deadline, it’s not actually deleted from the Deadline Database right away. Instead, it is moved to a separate collection of jobs that are waiting to be purged, and it will only be purged from the Database after it has been sitting in this collection for a configurable amount of time (more on this later).

While jobs are in this collection, they are essentially hidden from the render farm. They cannot be viewed, rendered, or modified. However, there is one way to interact with them, and that is to restore (undelete) them.

To undelete a job, open the Deadline Monitor and select tools -> Undelete Jobs. This will bring up then delete Jobs window. From here, you can select the jobs you want to restore, and then press ok to undelete them.

Note that you need Super User permission to access this feature. If you do not have permission to use this feature, ask your administrator to undelete the job for you.

When a job is undeleted, it is moved out of the deleted job collection, and everything is restored (including the job state, task statistics, and render logs). It’s like the job was never deleted in the first place!

HOW ARE DELETED JOBS PURGED?

As mentioned above, you can configure your Deadline Repository to purge deleted jobs after a certain interval of time. If you set the interval to be longer, you will have more time to restore deleted jobs, at a minor cost of increased storage space (jobs, tasks, and render logs, etc). A shorter interval can help keep the storage footprint low, but gives you less time for recovery. An interval of 0 can even be used to purge deleted jobs immediately. Given that storage is often cheap, it’s generally recommended to keep deleted jobs for a couple hours, just for peace of mind.

The job purging settings can be configured from the Deadline Monitor by selecting Tools -> Configure Repository Options. Note that this also requires Super User permissions. Then select the Job Settings page from the list on the left, and select the Cleanup tab.

From here, you can set the interval (in hours) before a deleted job is purged from the Database. Note that deleted job purging is performed by Deadline’s House Cleaning operations.

ADVANCED UNDELETE AND PURGE

If you want to purge a job from the deleted collection, or undelete it, you can do so manually using the scripting APIDeadline Command, or the Deadline Web Service. Here’s an example of how to purge a deleted job using Deadline Command:

This is an example of undeleting a job using Deadline Command:

These APIs can be used in custom systems to provide additional functionality or automation.

CONCLUSION

Deadline provides the tools you need to recover jobs that were unintentionally deleted, while also giving you control over how long job data is kept around. Using the configuration options above, you can rest easy knowing that you have control over when and where your job data goes!