“Deleted” tickets are only purged after a set number of days with no new messages

From Cerberus Helpdesk Wiki

I’ve seen this behavior throw new users for a loop after stumbling on their “deleted” tickets still in the Helpdesk. Usually it occurs when someone did a search for an old ticket ID and noticed it was X’d out. To see if you currently have any deleted tickets, do a search where ‘deleted = true (1)’.

Deleted tickets are normally hidden from view, but can be found with the right search.

Every 24 hours the Helpdesk purges all deleted tickets, where 7 days have passed with no new messages to the conversation. This is the default but if you want to adjust how often the Helpdesk takes out the garbage, and how many days have to pass for a ticket to be deemed trash, click ‘helpdesk setup’, the ‘Scheduler’ tab and then the ‘Maintenance‘ link.

Tweak the settings to control the purging functionality.

• Run every: how often the garbage man visits
• days of inactivity: how long a ticket has to rot

Holding onto deleted tickets for a few days definitely has its benefits. For one thing you get a “do over” in case you accidentally dismissed a ticket prematurely. If you feel the need to be a pack rat and disable the 'Maintenance' job, you can, but make sure you do a spring cleaning once in a while too and clear up some space.

[edit] Reducing the size of your Cerb4 database

The size of your database is directly impacted by tickets and their attachments, so to make backups smaller and/or reduce your online storage, it's recommended you purge often. Start by reporting all spam and deleting any irrelevant tickets you no longer need. Then temporarily set the ‘days of inactivity’ to zero, save changes and click ‘run now‘. You should get a readout of everything that was purged (you can see the number of "ticket records" that were flushed near the top).

Clicking 'run now' shows you what was deleted.

Close the browser window and you're done. Don’t forget to change the number of days back up to a reasonable amount! Or turn off 'Maintenance' again if you went that route.

Adapted from a Cerb4 blog post. Note that two of the behaviors have been split into their own wiki articles, while the original Behavior #3 "role reversal" is no longer an issue and has been excluded.