Retention periods

How long your app keeps deleted records is an ordinary setting, such as soft_delete_retention: Duration. A lifecycle reads it as purge: { after: config.soft_delete_retention } (Lifecycle). after: takes a Duration setting that isn't secret (data.lifecycle_purge_after otherwise). A purge run uses the value the app started with, and a period that isn't above zero deletes nothing. How retention fits the wider support for personal data, such as marking personal fields, erasure and export, is in Personal data.