You are talking about permanently deleting DELETED records. To go through and try to delete THOUSANDS of old records via the user interface is too difficult. I’m talking about a function that AFTER pruning deleted records, goes through select tables, like cases, tasks, invoices, emails, notes, etc. etc. (excluding contacts, workflow, and other tables that are necessary for ongoing operation) and looks for records say older than 5 YEARS! And exports them to a compressed SQL file and then removes them from the active database.
If you had like 10 years of data without doing this you would have some tables that are GIGANTIC with possibly hundreds of thousands of records which would slow down queries. I am very surprised if there isn’t some third party module that is available that does the archiving?
So you are saying the only thing people can do is remember to periodically manually delete old records in several modules and then run DB prune? That is a terrible crazy method.