# Data retention

Learn about our data retention policies.

Our data retention policy defines how long we retain user profiles, sessions, events, and resources for your account.

Following best practices, we recommend storing data only as long as it provides value. Additionally, certain laws and regulations may impose specific retention requirements, so it is important to align your retention settings with your legal obligations.

## How it works

The default data retention period for each data type varies by plan:

| Plan   | User profiles | Sessions | Events  | Analytics | Backup   |
| ------ | ------------- | -------- | ------- | --------- | -------- |
| Scale  | 60 days       | 60 days  | 60 days | 90 days   | 360 days |
| Growth | 30 days       | 30 days  | 30 days | 90 days   | 180 days |
| Free   | 1 day         | 1 day    | 1 day   | 90 days   | 90 days  |

Rather than enforcing a fixed cutoff date, we offer flexible data retention that ensures user profiles remain available as long as they stay active. For example, if retention is set to 90 days and a user visits your application every 30 days, their profile will be retained indefinitely. However, if a user visits once and never returns, their profile will be deleted after 90 days of inactivity.

Retention is calculated based on the ingestion date of the most recent event associated with each profile.

> **Question: How does retention affect audience segmentation?**
>
> Audience segmentation relies on the current session, user profile, and event history. For Growth plan organizations, these are the rules:
>
> - **Current session data**: Only includes users currently browsing your applications.
>
> - **User profile data**: Only includes users who browsed your applications within the last 90 days.
>
> - **Event history data**: Only considers events from the past 90 days for users who browsed your applications within the last 90 days.

To change your data retention settings, please [contact our support team](https://croct.com/contact/support).

## Cleanup policy

An organization is considered unused if it has not received any event traffic or user activity for 120 consecutive days. After this period, we permanently delete all organization data unless you explicitly request immediate deletion through a [support ticket](https://croct.com/contact/support).