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Data Retention Hero Pn
Available on Enterprise plan

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Overview

Dovetail offers customizable data retention features that allow you to automate the deletion of video and audio files across your workspace after a defined period of time. By default, Dovetail retains your data until you choose to delete it, cancel your account, or turn on automatic data deletion. What’s covered: Audio and video files uploaded to project notes. What’s not covered: Channels data, documents, attachments, and other general workspace content are not affected by data retention settings.

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How custom data retention works

Set the default time before video and audio files within your projects are automatically deleted by setting data retention periods. Once the retention period has passed, video and audio files will be deleted from the project, without affecting any highlights, reels, or transcripts created from them, so you can keep building on your customer knowledge in Dovetail. The retention period is calculated from each file’s upload (creation) date. Once that period has passed for a given file, here’s what happens:
  1. 7 days before deletion: Dovetail notifies the relevant people that a file is scheduled for removal:
    1. The user who originally uploaded the file
    2. The user who created the note containing the file
    3. Managers with full access to the project containing the file
    4. All workspace admins
  2. At expiry: the original video/audio file is deleted. Any highlights or reels already made from that file are automatically converted to independent clips before the original is removed, so they keep working without interruption.
  3. Recovery window: the original file is retained for 30 days after deletion, and can be restored during that window if needed (contact support). After 30 days, it’s permanently removed and cannot be recovered.
If highlights have already been referenced in your docs, you’ll need to navigate to those docs and update the references for them to be visible again. Learn more about updating highlight references →

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Configure custom data retention

Custom data retention can be configured at both the workspace and project levels.

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Delete all data across a workspace

  • To set a default workspace-level data retention period, open ⚙️ Settings → Data retention
  • From there, go to Data retention period and set the workspace time period
  • Choose a retention period from the dropdown. Options range from 90 days up to 12 years, or Indefinite to keep automatic deletion turned off
When configured at the workspace level, all audio and video files across your workspace will be affected.

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Delete data from a specific project

There may be projects where your team need to ensure data is deleted within a time period different to what is set at the workspace-level. This may be due to the nature of the project itself, or agreements made with their research participants. You can enforce a data retention period at the project-level to ensure project data is deleted at the required timeframe.
  • To update a project’s data retention period, go to ⚙️ Settings → Data retention and toggle on Enable project-level configuration.
  • From there, navigate to the project you want to enforce a different retention period for, select your time frame, and confirm.
If both are configured, the project-level configuration will take precedence over the workspace configuration, giving you more flexibility to set less or more restrictive rules per project.

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Disable project-level configuration

While workspace-level configuration can be done by any workspace admin, project-level configuration can only be done by users with Full access to the specific project itself. Due to this, workspace admins can disable project-level configuration entirely, meaning that all projects follow the same retention period set at the workspace level.
  • To enable custom data retention, workspace admins can navigate to ⚙️ Settings → Data retention, and select a desired retention period from the dropdown.
  • From this page, they’ll also be able to enable project-level configuration.

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FAQ

Users will be notified of upcoming deletion events 7 days prior to the event occurring. Below is a list of who will be notified and in the following order:
  1. The user who originally uploaded the file.
  2. The user who created the note containing the file.
  3. Managers with full access to the project containing the file.
  4. All workspace admins.
Videos can only be retrieved within 30 days from deletion, if the deletion took place during this time, please reach out to our support team for further assistance.
Any videos that fall outside of the new retention period will be deleted within 24 hours.
Yes! Once a video or audio file as been automatically deleted from a project, any transcripts or highlights created from this will remain in your project.
The original video will remain. We won’t automatically delete the parts of the video that you unhighlighted.
Yes. Even though the original file is deleted any highlights you’ve made will remain, this includes watching and exporting highlight reels.