Data Retention and Archival

Your database grows every day. New users sign up. Orders are placed. Logs accumulate. Events fire. And because disk space feels cheap and deleting data feels scary, most teams follow the same strategy: keep everything forever.

This works until it doesn't. Your database is now 2TB. Queries that used to take milliseconds now take seconds. Your backup takes six hours. Your cloud storage bill has tripled. And somewhere in that 2TB is data from users who deleted their accounts three years ago — data you're legally required to have deleted under GDPR.

Data retention and archival is the discipline of deciding what to keep, how long to keep it, where to store it as it ages, and when to delete it permanently. It's less exciting than building features, but ignoring it creates problems that ar