Patent ID: 8214337

Claim:
A method for data management through decomposition and decay comprising: decomposing by a data maintenance system a type of data item by identifying constituent units of the data item, wherein the data maintenance system comprises a microprocessor; creating by the data maintenance system a shelf-life criterion for the constituent units by assigning one or more priority dimensions each data item and to each constituent unit, establishing one or more data life dimensions applicable to all the data items and constituent units of the data item type; establishing by the data maintenance system relationship factors for each of a plurality of data items to other data items, and relationships between constituent units within data items and between data items; for each of a plurality of data items of the data item type currently stored by data storage system, wherein the data items occupy an amount of computer storage, periodically calculating or periodically updating a decomposability index by the data maintenance system for each constituent unit as a function of the priority dimensions, the relationship factors and the data life dimensions, wherein the decomposability indices are additionally moved towards a threshold for constituent units which are reproducible; and subsequent to the calculating or updating, decaying by the data maintenance system the data type by periodically deleting from the computer storage all constituent units which have decomposability indices exceeding a configured threshold, the decay reducing the amount of computer storage occupied by a remaining plurality of data items of the data type.