Setting data retention

Deciding how long things are kept: a policy question first and a setting second. Configuring a period nobody agreed is how a year of history disappears.

Deciding how long things are kept: a policy question first and a setting second. Configuring a period nobody agreed is how a year of history disappears.

Set it up

1. Agree the retention period with whoever owns compliance.
2. Open Admin Center, then Account, then Security, then Deletion schedules.
3. Create a schedule matching that period. Each kind of data has its own, and without the ADPP add-on you get one active schedule per kind, so it has to describe your whole rule for that kind in one go. With the add-on it is ten per kind.
4. Start narrow, on one category, and check what it would remove. A new schedule is created inactive and deletes nothing until you activate it, so there is room to look before anything happens.
5. Activate it, knowing what that means: everything already matching the rule is deleted immediately, and from then on it runs continuously. The confirmation dialog makes you tick that you understand both.
6. Review after the first cycle.

Agree the policy first

The setting is easy. The decision is not, and it is not yours alone: retention periods come from law, from contracts and from what the business needs, and they differ by data type.

Configuring a period nobody agreed is how a year of history disappears and somebody asks where it went.

Keeping everything is a choice too

Data you hold is data you must protect, must find during a subject request, and must account for. "We keep it all forever" is a decision with costs, not a neutral default.

Deletion is permanent

Once a schedule runs there is no recovery. Test the scope carefully, because a schedule with a wider reach than intended removes a great deal very efficiently.

Watch what it takes with it

Deleted tickets leave your reporting. A schedule removing everything older than a year means year-on-year comparisons stop working, and that is usually discovered afterwards.

Decide whether you need aggregate history before deleting the detail.

Start with attachments

Often the best first step: they are the bulk of storage, the highest risk, and the least needed for reporting.

See also

• What deletion schedules do
• Creating an attachment deletion schedule
• What Zendesk stores and where