I wanted to get some input from the SCM community regarding build archiving. When using either a CI or nightly build approach, a number of builds are generated during a release. How do people generally define a retention policy for retaining builds on disk? Once the retention policy dictates that a build should be removed from disk, what happens to it? Do people back it up to tape or some other media? Do people simply delete it entirely?

I ask because there are situations in which, for example, a bug is filed against a particular build and the dev team may want to go back an investigate. Typically, we've been archiving to tape, but it's very time consuming and I don't feel that the value is outweighing the cost.

Thanks.

It’s all about process you follow and what release cycle you have..Dev team doesn’t need to refer old build until some milestone has been achieved as part of build. So as a Build engineer you need to know all the milestone achieved and which build CI# and revision number.
you can write a script which will store a information about revision number associated with the build and Build number, this number can be referenced in the future to get same build using CI tools
Scenario two: here I do follow some process. Like


I always clean up incremental build.

I do escrow audit after any patch, major or minor release.

Base line after any milestone met and documentation

Keep more than one year build only when if its matching with some milestone