Data retention for small teams

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Most advice about data retention assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Most data problems are ownership problems that turned into technical ones. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to keep

Keeping everything forever is a liability, not an asset. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it.

How we handle it

Deletion has to work across backups too. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

How to tell if yours is fine

Numbers get quoted in meetings long after anyone remembers how they were calculated. Three things worth confirming about data retention before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Retention rules should be written down and enforced automatically — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.