Schedule user deletion
  • 05 Jul 2023
  • 1 minute to read

Schedule user deletion


Article Summary

When handling and purging user data and content, you may need to ensure that you only retain user data for a set amount of time in order to comply with specific laws or company policies. For example, if an employee leaves the organisation then you may need to retain their data for a certain period, and then delete it.

As of Totara 17.3 you can configure when suspended users will be deleted using scheduled user actions. If you have also created an automated purge type for deleted users, this data purge will also happen automatically as part of this action. You can access the Scheduled user actions page by going to Quick-access menu > Users > Scheduled user actions.


Custom actions can be developed by Totara Alliance partners in a backwards-compatible way. See the developer documentation for more information.

In the table on this page you can see all scheduled actions, with the type of action (e.g. Delete user), and whether the action is Enabled or Disabled. You can click the icon of three dots (three_dots(1)) to Edit or Delete an action, or view the Past actions report for an action, which allows you to see which users have been deleted as a result of this scheduled action.

Action frequency
These actions are processed as a scheduled task on a daily basis.

To schedule user deletion, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Quick-access menu > Users > Scheduled user actions.
  2. Click Add actions.
  3. Give the user action an Action name and Description.
  4. To execute on the next scheduled task run, check the Enabled box for the Status setting.
  5. Select whether you want the action to be applied to All users or specific Audiences. If you select Audiences, browse and select the audiences you require, then click Add. You can click Add audience to select more audiences.
  6. Leave the User status as Suspended. This will set the action to only apply to users who already have this user status type.
  7. Leave the Data source as Date suspended. This is the source date that will be used when calculating the duration period.
  8. Set the Duration field to determine how long ago the users must have been suspended in order to be deleted in this action. For example, if you set this field to 3 years then any users whose accounts were suspended more than three years ago will be deleted.
  9. Click Add.

You can then see your new action in the table.

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