What is ASM's data retention policy?

[ketalabama]

Hi. I don't see any information on this in the user manual or on this forum. Apologies if it exists and I missed it. But what is the data retention policy for Animal Details such as notes, hidden notes, pictures etc? I did learn earlier that Audit logs are purged after I think one year. But sometimes I will go to look up something for an animal adopted several years ago and I won't see a picture or a hidden note and I could have sworn those were there at the time of adoption. Since we take returns, even if years later, having the full initial picture of that animal is important. Of course I could be wrong.
But it would be good to know the data retention policy (and backup policy).

1. Is all data related to an animal kept until user deletes? Regardless of whether adopted or not?
2. If not all data is kept, what data is purged and when?
3. What is ASM's backup protocol? I'm assuming if there were some failure that our information is backed up and could be restored.

Thanks!
Kim

[bobintetley]

It sounds like you're asking about the sheltermanager.com service rather than ASM the software. For sheltermanager, the answers are:

1 + 2. Yes, all data is kept forever. The audit trail is the only exception to this and it's done for performance reasons since the system has to load audit data every time you view a record, and write it every time a record is changed.

There are options under "Settings->Options->Data Protection" that can be enabled to anonymise personal data after a number of years, delete redundant/old media to save storage space, etc. By default none of these options are on and all data is kept forever.

3. All databases are backed up and stored off site every week. We can also do point in time recovery back to the beginning of the week in case of malicious behaviour, and the system also has a delete log that we can use to restore any deleted records on request (including media). The deletion log is kept for 6 months, so we can restore records as far back as that.

[ketalabama]

Yes thank you, that is exactly what I was wanting to confirm. I think some of the older records where I feel like info is missing must just be that people were not as diligent about filling in information when we were first using the software. Again, thank you for the clear explanation!