As we've seen earlier, Destruction is the last stage of a record lifecycle. After a record has been retained and is no longer needed or has been transferred from the repository to a new location, the document is available for destruction.

In the previous section on Accession, we looked at the example of a record that had destruction as the final step of its disposition, immediately after the record was transferred for accession.

If we select the Destroy action for a record that is available for destruction, we are presented with the following dialog:

After confirming that we would like to destroy the record, there is a second Confirmation screen:

After confirming a second time, the file contents of the record are deleted. With the file content for the record missing, just a stub entry for the record remains in the system. The stub still contains the complete metadata for the record and also all the audit history information that has been logged for the record. In the document list, the entry for the item shows a small status icon of a trash can and the thumbnail for the item is changed to a picture of an icon with an information mark, which indicates the record has been destroyed and the metadata is available for information only: