The default retention and archiving mechanism for Windows 2012 Event Logs

There's no single answer. Factors to consider:

• legal requirements for retention or destruction
• company policies for retention and destruction
• how long the logs are useful
• what questions you're hoping to answer from the logs
• how much space they take up

I've got some logs that roll over in days, and others that are kept for years.

I tend to keep access logs longer (in some cases, forever, once I've stripped identifying information out of them) than error logs as in theory, I don't need them once I've fixed the problems.

I keep some other debugging logs (showing user activity, how they're interacting with the system, etc.) around so we can see how things change with each version.

...

And this reminds me of anecdote when I worked for a university -- management brought in an outside consultant to do a third-party review of the webserver we were building. I was told to hand over 3 months of logs for them to review if we had sized the system appropriately. I knew that was a sign they didn't know what the hell they were doing, as universities are cyclic -- webserver load trended up over time, but with spikes at the beginning of each year, finals time, etc.

My understanding from setting this using local security policy (GPO) which I'm guessing will be the same behavior is that it will overwrite firstly if it gets to the maximumsize or if the maximumsize is not met it will start to overwrite after 7 days.