We’re excited to announce the ability to delete Data Stores, a powerful new control for managing your experience’s data. You can now delete Data Stores directly from the Data Stores Manager on the Creator Hub or through a new set of Open Cloud APIs, now in public Beta.
Once a Data Store is deleted, it is as if it never existed – all of its keys are deleted, its name can be reused, and it no longer contributes to your experience’s storage usage.
To protect your data from accidental deletion, a Data Store deletion is not immediate. Instead, it is buffered by a 30-day cooldown period, during which you can cancel the deletion.
How to Delete Data Stores
Via the Data Stores Manager: You can now delete entire Data Stores and keys directly from the Data Stores Manager. For detailed instructions, please see our documentation.
Via Open Cloud: New Open Cloud APIs provide programmatic access to Data Store deletion:
DeleteDataStore – schedules permanent deletion of a Data Store in 30 days
UndeleteDataStore – cancels permanent deletion before 30 days have passed
FAQs
What impact could Data Store deletion have on my experience’s business logic?
Data Stores scheduled for deletion are immediately made inaccessible. Any attempts to read or write to them will fail. If you notice an increase in InternalError messages or “The data store is deleted” errors in your experience’s error logs, you should use the UndeleteDataStore API to cancel the deletion before the 30-day period is over. (The end date is shown on the Data Stores Manager and returned by the Open Cloud API.) This is a critical safety measure if a part of your experience’s logic accidentally relies on a deleted Data Store.
How is my experience’s storage usage affected?
Immediately after a Data Store is scheduled for deletion, it is removed from the “# Data Stores” count on your Data Stores Manager. Its storage usage is then reclaimed incrementally as each key is permanently deleted following the 30-day cooldown period.
Note: Data Store level storage metrics on the Data Stores Manager are currently unavailable for universes with more than 100 Data Stores. Please note that if your experience already has more than 100 Data Stores, you will not be able to see Data Store level storage metrics, even if you delete enough Data Stores to get under the threshold. This feature gap is something our team is aware of and working on prioritizing. We apologize for any inconvenience in the meantime.
Can we have a way to get notified about this? If any experiences I have edit access to are having an entire data store deleted, I want to know as soon as possible in case it’s a mistake somebody else made that may go unnoticed or a compromised account. I would prefer email AND on-site notifications, to increase the likelihood that I notice the deletion.
Is there any chance we can see erasure requests being embedded in to this?
It would be really handy if we could have some sort of psuedo variable substitution, or something along those lines. For whenever there is an erasure request - a developer could specify some sort of f-string like python. UserData${username}, or some placeholder templating system similiar to that. Where users can specify the proper template for which keys need to be deleted.
Can there be an option to immediately delete the data after marking it for deletion? This would be pretty useful for testing, sometimes I want to change the format data is stored in or wipe data but too many people have played and it becomes impossible or extremely tedious to manually delete keys.
I’m trying to delete some datastores, and I can’t. It would appear I cant delete datastores with a “/” in the name. Such as “DS2/-1” or “Master/602934790”. Underscores and hyphens are fine.
A Roblox feature that allows us to actually delete things? In this economy?
Jokes aside this is a great feature for us developers who often have to update our datastore systems or accidently write something inappropriate in them. Through this feature, we will be able to focus on the parts of our games that we actually actively use.
Since this feature got added, it would be awesome if we see other features as well, for example datastore renaming or the ability to run an operation across an entire datastore. Having such abilities would help for data mitigation processes in case we want to change how we handle data internally without having to worry about the data of old players. If something like this already exists, please correct me.
While this is a great change, I’d also like the ability to edit datastores, as this would greatly improve and streamline fixing players saved data in our games without needing to develop tools to do so for every datastore we have in our game.
I would also like for the delayed execution of direct edits or deletions to datastores to be modifiable by the group or game owner ONLY, i.e. instead of 30 days before a delete or edit is applied allow us to set it to 15 days, or 60. Furthermore, it’d be very nice if the owner can also have an immediately execute button ONCE the deletion or edit is pending the timer to run out.
With all these new features being added to the Open Cloud API, is there an ETA on resolving issues such as MessagingService not working with Group API keys? It seems like expanding functionality could make it more difficult to address this critical problem, which affects both my own and others’ experiences. Thank you!
