I have an issue with my process, of publishing InfoPath forms, such that it is filling up my drive space on my server. It seems that every time I publish a form (this is a collection of web browser forms), the new version is being saved with many (many!) previous versions as well. On my server's C drive, I have found the form templates in the following path with the "FT...." being one of the form templates.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\FEATURES\FT-01-f45ada14-4df3-b9d2-9a0a-e49c865f02f7
If you open this folder, there will a collection of folders from as far back as version 11, up through current (590). Each version number has multiple folders which contain a replica of all previous versions. Like for the final version 590, there are a total of 31 folders ranging from solution.xsn.1.0.0.590.1.0.0.487 to solution.xsn.1.0.0.590.1.0.0.590 (with each folder containing a copy of the qrules library dll and the solution.xsn). I'm not sure the difference, but some versions have many more folders (like version 485 has 86 folders ranging from ...140 to ...485). In total, this one form is taking up 6.5 gb of drive space.
Question 1: is there a way to regulate this publishing process where all these version are not saved each time a form is published, or some settings to stop this. I found in Site Content Types, the retention option. Is this the solution? If so, any guidance on setting it up with respect to IP forms would be greatly appreciated.
Question 2: is there a clean way to get rid of all these old versions, such as not to make something crash. I was leary of simply deleting the folders of the old versions (like, all folders prior to the final version folder collection) through Windows Explorer on the server. I thought maybe removing the form, deleting the site content type, republishing was the answer, but when I did, there was no "automatic" clean up.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! I'm running SharePoint 2010 and InfoPath 2010.
Thanks, Gwen Wilson