question How to backup, store and read Nifi Provence ( lucene ) *.gz files in Support Questions

How to backup, store and read Nifi Provence ( lucene ) *.gz files

zzzz77 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 02:59:02 GMT

We were looking at storing the provenance *.gz ( lucene ) files so we could have a record of all activity through Nifi, as our IT security people are fussy about such things.

It seems Nifi writes to multiple files at the same time, so this may not be possible, or perhaps there is a better way of doing this?

I would welcome thoughts as to how we might do this, or maybe propose a different way to achieve the same logging outcome.

Thanks in advance.

Re: How to backup, store and read Nifi Provence ( lucene ) *.gz files

vafs — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:53:33 GMT

Hello @zzzz77,

Maybe this blog can help you: https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Community-Articles/Understanding-how-NiFi-s-Content-Repository-Archiving-works/ta-p/249418
There explains how to handle the repository archive and it could work for what you need.

Also, there are other options like the Reporting Tasks documented here: https://nifi.apache.org/docs/nifi-docs/
SiteToSiteProvenanceReportingTask is an option for your need.

Re: How to backup, store and read Nifi Provence ( lucene ) *.gz files

MattWho — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:03:40 GMT

@zzzz77

Provenance can be very noisy depending on size of your dataflows and the amount of FlowFIles being processed through those dataflows. The provenance repo has age and size configuration that trigger roll-off of old events. So you may not reach the retention age if you reach size first. Also would not be trying to read provenance files while they are being written to.

The SiteToSiteProvenanceReportingTask might be the solution you are looking for in Apache NiFi. This reporting task will send all provenance events over Site-To-Site protocol to a target NiFi where you can then feed them into any long term storage medium of your choice in a human readable format.

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Thank you,
Matt