Data retention policies and best practices

Retention is a privacy feature. Knowing exactly how long raw events live, and what happens when they expire, is the difference between a defensible pipeline and a liability. Tracabit's default policy keeps one year of history on the Developer tier and two years on Pro, with custom schedules available for Enterprise.

Start by deciding what you actually need: daily aggregates for trend reports, raw events for cohort and funnel analysis, and crash reports for debugging. Many teams can keep aggregates indefinitely while expiring raw events after 90 days — that single decision cuts storage cost and privacy surface dramatically.

Configure the policy before you scale, not after. When events expire, they should be purged from storage in a way you can verify. Your compliance schedule should be documented in the same place your team documents its data flows, so auditors have a single page to read.

Finally, remember that retention interacts with deletion requests. If a user asks for their data to be removed, your pipeline should be able to honor that — which is easier when you store as little as possible in the first place. Less data, clearly scheduled, is the most robust compliance posture.