Q: Your Artifactory (or Nexus) server abruptly crashes on a Thursday. You discover the disk is 100% full. The CI pipeline has been uploading every single 1GB Docker image and 500MB Java JAR from every single minor commit strictly for the past three years. How do you design an automated, resilient retention policy?

Artifact registries must never be treated as infinite black holes. You must ruthlessly separate Snapshots (ephemeral development builds) from Releases (production artifacts).

• Configure the strict registry retention policies differently:
• Snapshots/Feature Branches: Ruthlessly delete these completely after 30 days, or explicitly retain only the 5 most recent builds per specific branch. They are inherently disposable.
• Releases/Tags: Retain Production-tagged artifacts indefinitely (or specifically bound to organizational compliance data-retention laws).

• Institute automated garbage collection pipelines that periodically aggressively purge isolated, untagged, dangling images across the registry to constantly enforce the baseline storage limits without manual intervention.