Retaining workflow history for auditing purposes

Question

I am in the process of upgrading our SharePoint environment from 2010 to 2013. As you may know SharePoint only keeps workflow associations around for a period of 60 days, after which they're deleted. We currently use these associations coupled with the workflow history for auditing purposes, or, if they've been deleted we can run an 'Activity Duration Report' for the workflow to show all the approvals that were done. The 'Activity Duration Report' was available if you went to a library's workflow settings, followed by 'Workflow Reports'.

I've done a test upgrade to our environment and seen these workflow reports have now disappeared under workflow settings (apparently Microsoft removed them in 2013). Now that we can't use these reports anymore, I'm wondering what to do next. I know we can increase the AutoCleanupDays to a larger value than 60 days using PowerShell, however the script would need to be ran every time a new document library is created, which will be quite cumbersome. Is there any other solutions to keep this history or at least go back after 60 days?

Answer 1

You can use the same script in your description, but have it run nightly, to pick up any new document libraries.

Also, if you perform regular backups to your environment, you should be able to track any audit trail back to the date/user that is needed. Whenever you need to see an audit trail, restore to a test site collection, and that workflow and workflow history will be there for viewing.

If you are tight on space, you can do an export of the workflow history to store it somewhere (even back on SharePoint). Write a script that will traverse through the workflow history and capture it all, let's say 30 days worth, then store it somewhere for auditing purposes.