Make Kafka Topic Log Retention Permanent

If you want to retain all topics forever, you can set both log.retention.hours and log.retention.bytes to -1.

You can find the default values for parameters here: https://jaceklaskowski.gitbooks.io/apache-kafka/content/kafka-properties.html

log.retention.bytes and log.retention.ms can be set to -1 if you want to keep the data in topics forever.

These special topics are compacted topics. This means they are made up of keyed messages and only keep the list recent key. A full write here. This is probably what you want for infinite retention time in most cases.