File retention is a critical part of data governance so your organization can comply with rules and regulations, save storage space, protect sensitive information, and keep data accurate by managing how long files are kept.

Use the File Expiration feature to control your data retention settings per-folder. When you've enabled the retention settings for a folder, the platform will automatically delete any files from that folder that have not been modified within the specified number of days.

Data Retention / File Expiration Settings

You must have administrator access to a folder to configure a folder's retention settings. To enable file expiration, you must supply the path and the number of days that files will be stored before they are automatically deleted. You may also choose to apply the rule only to the files in the folder and not to any of its subfolders.

The File Expiration setting only affects files, so your folder structure will be left intact.

Overriding Settings in Subfolders or Excluding Subfolders Entirely

By default, a folder's File Expiration setting will also apply to its subfolders, but you can override this behavior in two ways.

The first method is to mark a folder expiration setting to not apply to subfolders.

The other way to override the behavior is to configure a separate File Expiration setting for a subfolder path. The subfolder's File Expiration setting can specify a different number of days, or even disable expiration entirely.

Deletion Timing

File expiration settings will apply to all files retroactively. This means if you have files older than the time frame you choose, those files will begin to be deleted within 24 hours of updating the setting.

The deletion of expired files occurs daily. Once per day, files in the affected folder and its subfolders, will have their age checked and, if the file is older than the specified retention period, the file will be deleted. How long the deletion process will take depends on how many files are being deleted and whether sub-folders are included.

Mounted Folders

File Expiration settings will not currently work with remote mounted folders, however we hope to lift this limitation in the future.

Logging

When Files.com performs its automated file expiration sweeps and deletes files, those deletions are recorded in the history logs just like any other deletion. The logs will show that the deletion was performed by the user "robot".

Retaining Deleted Files

The File Expiration folder setting deletes active files after a specified interval. There is a separate capability that determines how long Deleted Files are retained as backups that are restorable by our support team.