R2 Data Catalog snapshot expiration now removes unreferenced data files

R2 Data Catalog, a managed Apache Iceberg ↗ catalog built into R2, now removes unreferenced data files during automatic snapshot expiration. This improvement reduces storage costs and eliminates the need to run manual maintenance jobs to reclaim space from deleted data.

Previously, snapshot expiration only cleaned up Iceberg metadata files such as manifests and manifest lists. Data files that were no longer referenced by active snapshots remained in R2 storage until you manually ran remove_orphan_files or expire_snapshots through an engine like Spark. This required extra operational overhead and left stale data files consuming storage.

Snapshot expiration now handles both metadata and data file cleanup automatically. When a snapshot is expired, any data files that are no longer referenced by retained snapshots are removed from R2 storage.

# Enable catalog-level snapshot expiration
npx wrangler r2 bucket catalog snapshot-expiration enable my-bucket \
  --older-than-days 7 \
  --retain-last 10

To learn more about snapshot expiration and other automatic maintenance operations, refer to the table maintenance documentation.