Data Retention

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Overview

Data retention controls how long Userpilot stores the analytics events and session replays captured for your application. Each Userpilot organization has two independent retention windows:

• Tracked data and interactions — how long Userpilot keeps analytics events (page views, tracked events, autocaptured raw events, content interactions) available for reporting.
• Recorded sessions — how long Userpilot keeps session replay recordings available for playback.

Aligning these windows with your needs helps you balance long-term trend analysis against compliance, privacy, and storage cost requirements.

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Use Cases

• Compliance and governance – Configure shorter retention to align with GDPR, CCPA, or internal data-handling policies.
• Long-term trend analysis – On Growth and Enterprise plans, extend retention to compare year-over-year product usage.
• Cost-aware operations – Keep only the data you actively use for reporting, reducing the surface area of stored personal data.
• Audit and incident review – Define a retention window long enough to reconstruct user journeys when investigating bugs or incidents.

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Retention by plan

On Growth and Enterprise, both windows can be extended on request. Your current values are always visible in Settings → Subscription → Plan details.

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What’s covered

Retention windows apply to:

• Tracked events (custom and built-in)
• Autocaptured raw events
• Content interactions (flow steps, checklist items, NPS / surveys responses, etc.)
• Session replay recordings

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Where retention shows up in the product

Retention windows are enforced consistently across the product. You’ll see their effects in the following places.

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Settings → Subscription → Plan details

The Plan details card now shows a Data retention section with two rows: Tracked data and interactions and Recorded sessions. The values reflect either your fixed plan limits or your custom configuration. Hover the info icon next to Data retention to see a tooltip with a Change button.

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Reports and Dashboards date pickers

Date pickers in Reports and Dashboards are bounded by your analytics retention window. The earliest selectable date is the start of your retention window, and period presets that fall outside the window are hidden. When a previously selected start date falls outside your current retention window, Userpilot automatically adjusts it to the boundary and surfaces a tooltip that reads: The date has been adjusted to stay within your data retention window.

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Sessions date picker and filters

The Sessions date picker, playlists, and saved filters are bounded by your session replay retention window — independent from analytics retention.

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Changing your retention period

Changing retention is available on Growth and Enterprise plans only.

1. Open Settings → Subscription → Plan details.
2. In the Data retention section, hover the info icon and click Change.
3. A scheduling page opens so you can book a call with your Userpilot support representative to discuss the new retention values.

If you’re on Starter, or Trial, upgrade to Growth or Enterprise to unlock configurable retention.

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What happens when data expires

• The cleanup job runs once per month, on the first Saturday of the month at 03:30 UTC. It is irreversible — expired data cannot be recovered.
• Analytics events older than your configured window are deleted from storage in the partitions that match the expiry boundary.
• Session replay recordings are tagged at capture time with their organization’s retention window, and expire automatically through storage lifecycle policies.

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FAQs