Data retention policy

This article explains how PlatoForms stores, retains, and deletes your form submission data, and how you can control it to fit your team’s needs.

Data retention policy

• What is data retention policy

  Data retention policy is about how data is stored and deleted for legal or compliance reasons. A basic policy should explain how data is stored, for how long, and on what systems. This usually depends on industry regulations.

  At PlatoForms, your form data is protected by strict security standards, and you can decide exactly how long to keep it.

• What data retention offers

  When you retain your data, you get to enjoy our helpful features for the entire retention period. These include the ability to edit forms, keep track of changes, download PDFs, and easily find and share your PDF documents.

• How long your data will be retened

  At PlatoForms, we care about keeping your form data safe, which might include sensitive customer info.

  By default, each submission is kept for 3 months after it was last updated, then permanently deleted, even while the form keeps receiving new submissions. When you subscribe to a paid plan for the first time, an unchanged 3-month setting becomes Forever. But, we’re flexible. You can choose your own retention time that suits your needs. For more details, see Account-specific retention time.

  Note

  If your paid plan ends, your data retention setting stays as it is for 1 year. After that, the free plan’s 3-month retention applies and older submissions are permanently deleted. We email the account owner when the plan ends, and again 30 days and 7 days before anything is deleted. Renewing your plan before that date keeps all your submissions.

• Who can change the retention period

  Our data storage rules apply to all your team’s forms, and only the Team Admin can change them.

  Note

  When you create an account, you are automatically the Team Admin for your own team.

• How PlatoForms delete data

  When a submission is around longer than our set storage time, we delete everything related to it, like PDFs and attachments, including the PDF of the answers of a Web Form. It’s done securely and permanently to protect your info. With a 0-day retention, a submission is deleted only after at least one of its files has reached your cloud drive.

• When you delete the data

  It might take up to 24 hours for us to remove old submission data from PlatoForms.

• Erase all submissions

  This feature lets you permanently delete all submission data in one click: ideal for teams with strict data privacy rules or when cleaning up large datasets.

  Warning

  Once erased, submission data cannot be recovered. Your forms remain intact and will not be deleted.

Account-specific retention time

For detailed information on retention periods based on different account types, please refer to the account-specific details.

Change data retention period

You choose how long we keep your data, from 0 days to forever. To set it:

1. Go to the Dashboard and click on Submissions in the left navigation.

   

2. At the top-right of the Submissions page, click Data Retention to open the system-wide data retention settings.

   

3. In the Data Retention Policy window, choose your preferred retention period from the dropdown.

   

   Note

   For a detailed description of the retention period, see the Account-specific retention time section.

4. Click Save to apply your settings.

Erase all submissions

1. Go to the Dashboard and click on Submissions in the left navigation.

   

2. At the top-right of the Submissions page, click Data Retention to open the system-wide data retention settings.

   

3. In the Data Retention Policy window, click Erase all submissions.

   

4. Confirm the deletion by clicking Confirm.