Data Retention

Transactions may be permanently deleted after a defined retention period. You can configure OneSpan Sign to keep transactions left in various statuses for an unlimited or set period of time. For example, your organization may want to keep completed transactions for an unlimited amount of time. On the other hand, transactions in other statuses, such as Draft or Declined, may not be vital to your organization and can be cleared out to free up your data storage.

Access to data retention settings varies based the type of user account you have:

• Basic Plan users can specify data retention settings for: Draft, Declined, Expired, Completed, Archived transactions.

• Business Plan users can change all data-retention settings.

• Professional Plan users can change all the settings except Total Transaction Lifetime and Incomplete Transactions.

To free storage space for your account, transactions can be permanently deleted after a defined retention period. Thus certain users can specify how long transactions in any of the following states will be retained on OneSpan Sign's servers: Draft, Opted out, Declined, Expired, Completed, Archived.

All data-retention settings for an account can be changed by its Owner (if the Roles and Permissions feature is off), or by its Admin and Manager (if the Roles and Permissions feature is on). In addition, a particular Data Management permission can be assigned to an account user.

By default, Data management self-service has been enabled for you. To disable this feature, contact our Support Team.

Managing Data Retention

When this feature is enabled, you can specify data-retention rules not only via this procedure, but also via the REST API.

To manage the retention of data on your account:

1. From the top menu in the New User Experience, click Admin > Data Retention. A Data Retention dialog box appears.

2. If you want to reset all intervals on this page to their default values, click RESET TO DEFAULT near the bottom of the page.

   For all existing accounts, the default retention interval for Incomplete Transactions is 120 days. For new accounts, the default retention interval for both Incomplete Transactions and Completed Transactions is 120 days. In this context: (1) "new accounts" are accounts created after OneSpan Sign 11.38 was released to Production; (2) "existing accounts" are all other accounts.

3. To specify how long transactions will be stored after their creation date, click the control for Total Transaction Lifetime, and change its associated number of days. The number of days to deletion will be calculated from when the transaction was created. For example, if this lifetime is 30 days, a transaction created on January 1 will be deleted on January 31.

4. To specify how long archived transactions will be stored, click the control for Archived, and change its associated number of days. The number of days to deletion will be calculated from when the transaction’s status changed to Archived. Note: No other setting on this page affects archived transactions.

5. To specify how long incomplete transactions will be stored, click the control for Incomplete Transactions, and change its associated number of days. The number of days to deletion will be calculated from when the transaction was created. Note: Incomplete transactions are in one of the following states: Draft, Declined, Expired.

   Transactions in the state Sent cannot be assigned a retention period, but you can optionally assign them a default expiry period and a maximum expiry period. In the second part of the dialog box is information about transactions in this state. If you want to change the expiry time for those transactions, open in a separate window see Sent Transactions Expiry Time. Once a Sent transaction has expired, it will become subject to the retention policy that your account has configured for Incomplete transactions. Example: If your Incomplete transactions are configured for deletion after 120 days, any Sent transaction more than 120 days old will be deleted overnight once it expires.

6. To specify how long completed transactions will be stored, click the control for Completed Transactions, and change its associated number of days. The number of days to deletion will be calculated from when the transaction’s status changed to Completed.

7. If you want to specify smaller retention values for incomplete transactions in particular states (Draft, Declined or Expired). click the control for the relevant state, and change its associated number of days. These controls are in the section Advanced Settings for Incomplete Transactions.

8. Click SUBMIT. The dialog box closes. Data for transactions in the various states will be purged once they have been in that state for the interval specified in this procedure.

   • If inconsistent deletion dates are specified, the date that occurs first takes effect. For example, suppose the Total Transaction Llifetime is set to 100 days, while Draft is set to 20 days. If a transaction is in the Draft state for 20 days, it will be deleted even though the Total Transaction Lifetime is 100 days.

   • Transactions will be purged overnight once they reach their specified date. Example 1: Suppose that Draft transactions have been configured to be purged after 20 days. A transaction which enters that state on 1 July will be deleted overnight on 21 July (assuming it's still in the Draft state). Example 2: Suppose that on 20 August Draft transactions are configured to be purged after 20 days. Any transaction created before 1 August that is still in the Draft state will be purged overnight on 21 August.

   • When transactions are about to be purged, the New User Experience indicates that fact at least 7 days before the purge.

   • Transactions in any state can be trashed. Putting a transaction in the trash doesn’t change its state — it’s just an additional attribute. The above retention period is calculated from when a transaction entered a state, not from when it was trashed. For example, suppose a transaction entered the state Opted Out on 1 April, but was trashed on 1 May. If Opted Out transactions' retention period is changed to N days, the transaction will be purged after (1 April + N days), not after (1 May + N days).

Video Tutorial: How to Set a Data Retention Schedule for Transactions Stored on OneSpan Sign