What to ask your agency about data retention

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on data retention, these questions are worth asking early.

Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Keeping everything forever is a liability, not an asset. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Deletion has to work across backups too. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What this looks like day to day

Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Three things worth confirming about data retention before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Deletion has to work across backups too — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.