Keeping and removing old data
Retention policies: archive or purge finished data once it is old and untouched — nothing shipped, nothing on by default, and a preview before anything moves.
Logs grow for ever and closed documents pile up. Platform → Data & Documents → Data Retention is where a company decides what happens to data once it is old and nobody is using it: archive it out of the live tables, or purge it.
Nothing is shipped and there are no defaults. With no policy, data is kept for ever. How long your company must keep an invoice or an access log is a legal question with a different answer in every country, and a default somebody else chose would be the wrong answer for most of them.
What a policy says
| Field | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Data | One kind of data, chosen from a catalogue of FINISHED data only (below). |
| Archive or purge | Archive moves the rows out of the live tables and keeps them, readable and restorable. Purge deletes them. |
| Older than (years) | Data is considered once it is at least this many years old. |
| Not added or changed for (years) | And only if nothing has added to it or changed it for this many years. Both are whole years and both are required; this one may not be more than Older than. |
| Runs | Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly. |
| First run | Optional. Empty means the next check after it is switched on. |
| At most (rows per run) | What one run handles; the rest wait for the next run. 50,000 unless you set it. |
| Switched on | A policy is created switched off. Preview it, then switch it on. |
"Changed" is read from the record’s own dates AND from the audit trail. A five-year-old invoice somebody corrected last month has been touched, even if its own dates do not say so.
What can be chosen
- Logs: the audit log, single sign-on attempts, ended sign-in sessions, the API Studio call log, webhook deliveries, the email outbox, integration events, workflow, pipeline and batch job runs, analytics query runs, report runs, printed form runs, the ASK question log, process mining runs, finished attention items, AI agent runs, IoT signals, the patient record access log, and legacy history archived by the migration cockpit.
- Closed business documents: closed support tickets, finished CRM activities, expired, rejected or converted quotations, closed or cancelled sales and purchase orders, and paid or void customer and supplier invoices.
The ledger and its journals are deliberately not offered. The ledger is the record everything else is reconciled to; a trial balance that changes because a retention job ran is not a trial balance anybody can sign.
What is kept, and what goes with a record
- A record that something else still refers to is kept, and counted with the reason. A closed purchase order that an invoice still points at stays where it is.
- Rows that belong to a record go with it: an invoice’s lines, a ticket’s messages. They are archived with it and restored with it, so a record is never half there.
Preview, Run now, and the schedule
- Create the policy. It is saved switched off.
- Press Preview. It counts what a run would archive or purge, and what it would keep and why — and changes nothing.
- Switch the policy on when the preview says what you meant. A background job checks every 15 minutes for policies that are due, and runs each on its period.
- Run now runs it at once, whatever the schedule says.
Every run, scheduled, by hand or a preview, is on Retention Runs: what it examined, what it archived or purged, what it kept, and who ran it.
Archive, and putting a record back
Archived Records lists what archive runs took out, each with the rows that went with it. Restore puts the record and its rows back exactly as they were. If something the record refers to has gone since — its customer deleted, say — the restore is refused as a whole rather than bringing back a record that points at nothing.
Purge cannot be undone. There is no recycle bin behind it and no backup this screen can reach. If you are not certain, archive: an archived record is out of every list and every report, and can still come back.
Who may do what
| To | You need |
|---|---|
| Preview a policy | Display on Retention Policies |
| Run an archive policy | Change on Retention Policies |
| Run a purge policy, or switch one on | Delete on Retention Policies |
| Restore an archived record | Change on Archived Records |
Purging needs delete rather than change because that is what it does. A person who may not delete an invoice one at a time should not be able to delete ten thousand of them by editing a schedule.
Since 20 October HR records can be retention targets, an archive can be purged after a number of years, and records under legal hold are always kept. See HR records: retention, legal hold, records exports and disciplinary actions.