The problem is as described in JENKINS-4501. As requested in JENKINS-4501, I am creating a new issue as this problem still exists in 1.602.

In short, Jenkins silently and erroneously deletes workspaces on slaves for matrix projects that are not old.

Over the course of the time I've worked with Jenkins this behavior has created literally days of work and waiting on very long running builds that rely on cached workspaces to be manageable. It's cost me more hours again today after restoring jenkins to a new server after a hardware failure. This setting was reset since it exists outside normal recommended backup files and I didn't think to add it when I "fixed" this last time.

Would it not be easier to have hudson.model.WorkspaceCleanupThread.disabled default to true? Having the default behavior be "destroy my data" seems bad, especially with how cheap disk is now. I'm sure when this option was implemented it made a lot of sense, but when I can get a 1TB for $50, it just seems wrong-headed. Let the fallow workspaces lie. I can clean them up if I need to.

If that's not an acceptable solution, could it not be moved to a config location in the Jenkins home? That way we can be relatively sure that the setting will be propagated in backups and not bite someone who thought they solved this problem and had forgotten about it?