How to clean up old phone-tap records automatically

How to clean up old phone-tap records automatically

What is this for?

Your Store has been running the Phone Taps feature for six months. You find the weekly tap count useful, but you do not need a record of every individual tap from a year ago — only the rolling trend. You also do not want the platform quietly hoarding website-visitor data forever. What you want is a sensible "keep the last ninety days, throw away the rest" rhythm that runs on its own.

That is exactly what the Phone Taps cleanup does. Once a day, the platform looks through your stored tap records, finds anything older than the retention window you set, and removes those rows. The dashboard you read in your admin always reflects the rolling window — so a tap from 95 days ago does not show up if your retention is 90 days.

This guide walks you through the cleanup behavior, how to choose a retention window, what happens to records when retention shrinks, and how to verify that cleanup is doing what you expect.

Good use cases

• An online store wants a steady ninety-day window so the dashboard always shows "the last quarter". Older taps cycle out automatically; you do not have to remember to clean them up.
• A wine bar with a privacy-first stance wants to keep tap records for only seven days. They prefer to make decisions on near-real-time data and not retain visitor information any longer than necessary.
• A studio worried about storage growth sets retention to 180 days and lets the daily cleanup keep the table from accumulating tens of thousands of rows over years of operation.
• A bakery preparing for a privacy audit wants documented evidence that their site retains visitor analytics for no more than thirty days. The setting plus the cleanup log together provide that documentation.
• A bookstore that ran an advertising campaign wants to keep a longer window during the campaign (180 days) and then shrink it back to 30 once the campaign data has been analyzed and exported.
• A community publication wants the cleanup window to match their standard quarterly reporting cadence — 90 days — so each report covers a complete window of fresh data.

What NOT to use this for

• Manually deleting individual visitor records — the cleanup is a date-based broom, not a one-row scalpel. It removes everything older than the retention window. If you need to remove a specific record (a privacy request from a visitor, for instance), that is a different action that has to happen by hand.
• Pausing data collection — cleanup removes old records; it does not stop new ones from being added. If you want to stop recording phone taps entirely, turn the Phone Taps feature OFF in Settings. Cleanup has nothing to do with whether new data is collected.
• Backing up your data before deletion — cleanup deletes; it does not archive. If you want to keep a copy of older records, export them to spreadsheet from the dashboard before they age past your retention window. Once they are cleaned up, they are gone.
• A retention policy for legal compliance — the platform offers retention as a convenience, but the legal definition of how long you must (or must not) keep visitor data depends on your jurisdiction and your agreements with visitors. Decide your legal retention with a privacy advisor; configure the platform setting to match.
• Selectively cleaning up only certain pages — the cleanup is global. It removes old records across every page on your site. There is no "keep tap records for the contact page but throw away records for the homepage" option.
• Triggering cleanup on demand from a public link — cleanup runs automatically once a day. There is no public "run cleanup now" trigger your visitors can use.

How this connects to other features

• Settings > Phone Taps > Retention (days) — the retention window. Cleanup uses this number every time it runs. Changing the window changes what cleanup will remove on the next run.
• Phone Taps dashboard — the dashboard always reads the current set of records. Once cleanup removes a record, it disappears from the dashboard immediately.
• Daily cleanup schedule — runs once every 24 hours, typically in the early morning of your site's timezone, to minimize impact on live traffic.
• Export to CSV — if you want to keep a record of older taps, the dashboard offers an Export CSV button that downloads everything currently stored. Run an export before shrinking your retention window if you want a copy of what is about to be cleaned up.
• Privacy notice — the retention window is the kind of detail that belongs in your privacy notice. Many sites mention "we keep aggregate analytics for up to 90 days" as a reassurance.
• Background job system — the cleanup is one of several recurring background tasks the platform runs on your behalf. They all use the same scheduling system and run during the same nightly window.

Before you start

A few things to know before you change retention or expect cleanup to run:

• You have decided on a retention window. The default is 30 days. Many sites pick 90 days for a quarter-over-quarter trend view. A few sites pick 7 days for stricter privacy. Decide before turning the feature on or shrinking an existing window.
• You have exported any records you want to keep. Cleanup is one-way. If you reduce retention from 180 days to 30 days and the cleanup runs that night, the records between days 31 and 180 are gone. Export to CSV first if you want to preserve them.
• You understand cleanup is automatic and global. You cannot ask cleanup to skip Tuesday's records, or to keep extras for one campaign. The window is one number; cleanup applies it uniformly.
• You know when the daily cleanup is scheduled. It typically runs once every 24 hours during low-traffic hours. The exact time varies by site and is shown on the dashboard ("Last run today 03:00").
• Your site's timezone is set correctly. The cleanup schedule honors your site's timezone, so a "ran at 03:00" entry on the dashboard reflects the time at your site's location, not your visitor's.
• You are checking for cleanup signs in the right place. The dashboard shows a "Last cleanup" line with the most recent run's time and how many records were removed. That is where to look.

Use the checklist below to confirm each item before you change retention. The numbers reflect a real Your Store retention adjustment from this spring.

Where to go

In your admin sidebar:

Dashboard > Settings > Phone Taps

The retention setting lives here, alongside the on/off switch for the whole Phone Taps feature.

The cleanup activity log lives in:

Dashboard > Phone Taps

That dashboard's sidebar shows the most recent cleanup run and how many records it removed.

Steps — configure retention and confirm cleanup is working

1. Open Settings > Phone Taps and review your current retention

In your admin, click Settings, then Phone Taps. The retention field shows the current value in days.

If this is your first visit to the screen since enabling the feature, the value is 30 — that is the default. If you have changed it before, it shows whatever you last set.

Note this current value before you change anything. Knowing the starting point is useful if you ever need to roll back.

2. Decide on your new retention

Pick a new value if you want to change it. Common choices:

• 7 days — strictest privacy. Useful for sites that only need a "this week vs. last week" comparison.
• 30 days — the default. Plenty of history for most week-over-week and month-over-month decisions.
• 90 days — a full quarter. The most popular non-default choice. Gives you quarter-over-quarter visibility.
• 180 days — a half-year. Useful if you want to see seasonal patterns (summer vs. winter, holiday vs. off-season).
• 365 days — a full year. Use only if you have a specific year-over-year analysis to do; otherwise this builds up records you do not need.

If you are not sure, pick 30 or 90. You can always change it later.

3. If you are shrinking the window, export first

This is the most important rule of using retention. If your current retention is 180 days and you change it to 30, the next cleanup run deletes everything older than 30 days. Anything you have not exported is gone.

Open the Phone Taps dashboard. Click the Export CSV button. Save the file. Now you have a snapshot of the full 180 days before any of it gets deleted.

If you are increasing retention or keeping it the same, no export is needed.

4. Save the new retention setting

Back in Settings > Phone Taps, change the Retention (days) field to your new value. Click Save changes. A green confirmation appears.

The new value is in effect immediately. Cleanup uses it the next time it runs (usually that night).

5. Wait for the next cleanup and confirm

Cleanup runs once every 24 hours. The exact time depends on your site's timezone and the platform's scheduling, but it is typically in the small hours of your site's morning.

The next day, open the Phone Taps dashboard. Look at the "Last cleanup run" line. It should show today's date, the time the run completed, and how many records were removed.

If you shrank the retention window, the count of removed records should match your expectation — roughly the size of the slice you cut off.

6. Confirm the dashboard now reflects the new window

The dashboard's totals (today, this week, this month, all time) now read off the smaller pool of records. The "all time" number is now what fits in your new retention window — not the longer history you had before.

This is normal. Once retention is shrunk, "all time" effectively means "all time within the retention window".

What success looks like

A working cleanup configuration, after a few days of operation, looks like this:

• The Phone Taps dashboard shows a "Last cleanup run" line with a recent timestamp.
• The "records removed" count on each daily run is a small steady number (a handful of records aging out each day) once steady-state has been reached.
• The total record count plateaus at a level matching your retention window — not climbing forever.
• You have a CSV export of any data you wanted to preserve before shrinking the window.

The screen below shows what the dashboard reports during a normal post-cleanup state — small daily delta, retention setting visible, last run a few hours ago.

What to do if it does not work

If the dashboard never shows a cleanup run:

• Confirm the Phone Taps feature is enabled. Cleanup only runs when the feature is on. If you turned the feature off, cleanup is paused. Records that were stored before you turned it off remain in storage; they will not be removed until you turn the feature back on.
• Wait at least 24 hours after enabling the feature. Cleanup runs once a day, so the very first cleanup happens during the night after you enable the feature. If you turned it on this morning, the first run is tonight.
• Check the site's scheduled task health. Cleanup is one of several scheduled tasks the platform runs on your behalf. If your scheduling system is not running (rare, but possible if your hosting setup has a problem), no cleanup runs. Open Settings > System health to see whether scheduled tasks are healthy.
• Reload the dashboard. The "Last cleanup run" line is refreshed when you load the page; if you have had the page open for hours, the number you see may be stale. Refresh.

If the cleanup is running but not removing as many records as you expect:

• Check the retention window. If retention is 365 days, cleanup only removes records older than a year. With six months of data, that is zero. The system is working correctly; there is just nothing to remove.
• Check the timestamp on your stored records. Open the dashboard and look at the "earliest record" line. If it is younger than your retention window, cleanup will not have anything to do until that record ages past the window.
• Check for data older than the dashboard shows. In rare cases, very old records can persist outside the dashboard's normal view. The cleanup still picks them up correctly, but the dashboard may not show them as removable. Contact support if the total count of records does not seem to be decreasing despite an old earliest-record timestamp.

If cleanup removes more records than you expected:

• Confirm your retention setting. A retention of 30 days deletes anything older than 30 days. If you accidentally set 30 instead of 300, that explains a big jump in deletions.
• Check whether someone else changed retention recently. If multiple admins have access, look at the Settings audit log to see who changed the setting and when.
• The first cleanup after a long pause can be large. If the feature was off for a while and is now on again, there can be a backlog of records that age past retention all at once.

If the dashboard says cleanup ran but the record count did not change:

• Cleanup may have found zero records to remove. That is reported as "0 records removed". It is not a failure — there was nothing older than the retention threshold to remove.
• Reload the dashboard. A stale page can show the old count.
• Confirm the timestamp on the cleanup line is recent. If it shows yesterday's date, cleanup did run last night and removed 0 records because there was nothing to remove. The record count does not change in that case.

Example 1: Your Store — first quarterly cleanup

You turned on Phone Taps last fall with a 90-day retention window. By February, the system had been collecting taps for five months — but the dashboard only ever showed the most recent 90 days, because cleanup was quietly removing the older entries every night.

Your experience: you could trust the dashboard. The "all time" number always meant "all time within the last 90 days". You never had to remember to clean up anything yourself. The retention setting did its job in the background.

Export the rolling 90-day data once a quarter into a spreadsheet for your own records, then let the next quarter overwrite. Over a year of operation, your storage of phone tap records stays a flat-line — never growing past the size that fits in 90 days of typical traffic — which is exactly what you want.

The lesson: pick a retention window that matches your reporting cadence and let cleanup keep storage at a steady level.

Example 2: Your Store Style Club — shrinking retention for privacy

The owner of Your Store Style Club had retention set at 180 days when a customer asked, in writing, how long the site retained visitor analytics. You wanted to be able to answer "no more than 30 days" rather than "up to 180 days".

Before changing the setting, you exported the full 180 days of data to CSV and saved the file in a private folder. Then you set retention to 30 days and saved.

The next night, cleanup ran and removed 4,212 records — everything older than 30 days. The dashboard's "all time" number dropped from 6,800 to about 1,800 (the records younger than 30 days). The privacy notice on the site was updated to "we keep website analytics for up to 30 days".

Two effects: a much shorter retention window in the privacy notice, and a clean export of the historical data you could still consult internally.

The lesson: the export-then-shrink pattern lets you tighten retention for privacy without losing the data you have already collected.

Example 3: Your Store Studio — lengthening retention for an analysis project

The owner of Your Store Studio normally runs 30-day retention. For a quarter, you were working on a report that compared the studio's call volume across an entire 12-month seasonal cycle.

You temporarily set retention to 365 days. From that day forward, cleanup stopped removing records as quickly, and the storage of phone tap records started growing.

Six months later, when the report was complete, you set retention back to 30 days. The next cleanup run removed everything older than 30 days — restoring the storage to its normal small size.

Important detail: the 12-month analysis only covered the period after he had increased retention. Records that had been deleted before he made the change were already gone. You had not run an export before increasing retention because you did not need pre-change data — the change was forward-looking.

The lesson: retention is forward-looking. Increasing retention preserves new records but does not resurrect deleted ones.

Example 4: A bookstore — the campaign window

Your Store Bookstore ran a heavy advertising campaign in October. They wanted to keep all phone-tap data from October through December for a post-campaign analysis, but did not need data from before or after that window.

Their plan: in late September, they exported the existing tap data and set retention to 90 days. The 90-day window covered October-December. After January 1, when the campaign analysis was done, they shrank retention back to 30 days, and cleanup removed everything older than 30 days, leaving them with a fresh start.

The lesson: a temporary widening of the retention window is a clean way to capture a specific period of data, then return to normal.

Example 5: A community publication — the privacy audit

Your Store Daily, a regional publication, was preparing for a privacy audit. The audit's checklist asked: "What is the maximum retention period for any visitor analytics on the site?"

The publication's editor pulled up Settings > Phone Taps > Retention and read the value: 30 days. She also took a screenshot of the dashboard's recent cleanup activity, showing daily runs with reasonable record-removal counts. Together, those two pieces of evidence answered the audit's question completely.

The lesson: a documented retention setting plus a visible cleanup log is what an audit needs. Make sure your settings match what your privacy notice says.

Things that change after retention runs

• The dashboard shows a smaller pool of records. Older records are gone; the rolling totals reflect only what is still stored.
• Exported CSVs include only records inside the current window. If you export today, you get the last N days where N is your retention. Records that were cleaned up are not in the file.
• The earliest-record timestamp moves forward. Before cleanup, the earliest record might have been 91 days ago. After cleanup, it is 89 days ago (the next day's earliest record has now aged into yesterday's earliest position).

Things to know that aren't obvious

• Cleanup is irreversible. Once a record is removed by cleanup, it is gone from your site. There is no "undo" or "trash" stage. Export anything you want to keep before shrinking retention.
• Cleanup does not affect the on/off switch. Turning the Phone Taps feature off does not delete existing records. They stay in storage. Cleanup only runs when the feature is on.
• The cleanup schedule is platform-managed. You cannot pick a custom time of day for cleanup to run. It runs once every 24 hours during a low-traffic window. The exact time can vary slightly day to day.
• Failed cleanup runs are retried. If a cleanup run fails (rare; usually a transient infrastructure hiccup), the system retries on the next scheduled cycle. A single failed run does not cause records to accumulate beyond retention by more than 24 hours.
• Cleanup is fast. Even with millions of records to consider, cleanup typically runs in well under a second. You will not notice any impact on your live site while it is happening.
• Reducing retention is a destructive change. Increasing it is preservative. Be deliberate about which direction you are moving.
• Daylight saving and timezone shifts are handled automatically. Cleanup runs once per 24-hour cycle regardless of clock-shifts. You will not see double-runs on the day of a time change.

Frequently asked questions

Can I run cleanup on demand? Not directly. Cleanup runs on its own schedule every 24 hours. If you need an immediate cleanup, the simplest path is to wait for the nightly run; alternatively, contact support to request a manual run.

Can I have different retention windows for different pages? No. The retention window is global across all your phone-tap records. There is no per-page retention.

What happens to my data if I turn the Phone Taps feature off? Existing records stay in storage. Cleanup pauses while the feature is off. If you turn the feature back on, cleanup resumes the next night and removes anything that is now past retention.

What is the smallest valid retention? The platform allows retention as low as 1 day. Below that is not allowed because the system needs at least one day's worth of data to populate the dashboard meaningfully.

What is the largest valid retention? The platform allows retention up to 365 days. Beyond that requires a custom configuration arrangement; most sites do not need it.

If I export to CSV, are the records also kept in the platform? Yes. Export is non-destructive. The export creates a copy; the originals remain in the system until they age past retention and cleanup removes them.

What if I want to keep a record but the dashboard says it has been removed? Once cleanup has removed a record, it is no longer accessible from the dashboard or from any reporting view. Your only fallback is whatever you previously exported. There is no recovery path for records that were never exported.

Does cleanup affect other data on my site? No. Cleanup only touches phone-tap records. Your pages, posts, products, users, and other data are completely independent of this cleanup.

Why does the dashboard sometimes say "removed 0 records"? That is normal. It means cleanup ran but found no records older than the retention window — usually because traffic during that day was steady-state and no records crossed the retention threshold. The system is working correctly.

Can I see a log of past cleanup runs? The dashboard shows the most recent cleanup run prominently. It also shows a small "last 7 days" summary of cleanup activity. Older cleanup activity beyond that window is not retained — the cleanup log itself follows a similar retention pattern.

Will reducing retention free up disk space on my site? The platform manages disk allocation; you do not manage it directly. Reducing retention does reduce the platform's storage usage for your site, but you will not see it as freed disk space because there is no per-customer disk quota visible to you.

Privacy considerations

Cleanup is the privacy-friendly default at the heart of the Phone Taps feature. A few considerations:

• Match retention to your privacy notice. If your notice says "we keep visitor analytics for up to 30 days", set retention to 30 days. Mismatches between policy and practice are exactly what privacy audits look for.
• Do not extend retention without reason. It is tempting to set retention high "just in case". Resist. Longer retention means more visitor data sitting in your system, which is more to protect and more to disclose.
• Document the choice. When you set retention, write a one-line note in your team's documentation: "Phone Taps retention is X days because Y." A future admin will appreciate knowing why.
• Export selectively, not by default. Just because you can export the full window does not mean you should. Export only when you have a specific analysis in mind. Exports become local files that you then have to manage and protect.
• Coordinate retention across all analytics. If your other analytics tools have 90-day retention, matching Phone Taps to 90 days is sensible. Mismatched retentions across tools are confusing for visitors who ask "how long do you keep my data".

Operational considerations

A few practical notes for site operators:

• The cleanup is silent. It does not send you an email, a notification, or a daily report. You only see it on the dashboard. If you want active confirmation, build the habit of checking the dashboard once a week.
• A long pause in your site's operation does not break cleanup. If your site is down for maintenance for a day, cleanup catches up the next time it runs. Records that aged past retention during the outage are removed at the next opportunity.
• Cleanup does not affect site performance. It runs against the database directly, not through your public site, so visitor traffic is unaffected.
• The activity log on the dashboard is itself bounded. You see the most recent cleanup runs but not a full history. If you need a historical record of cleanup activity, take a screenshot of the dashboard at regular intervals.
• Cleanup is tied to your site's timezone. "Last cleanup run today 03:00" reads in your site's configured timezone. If your team is in a different timezone, the local clock-time when cleanup runs will appear shifted in their experience.

Quick checklist before you change retention

Run through this before clicking Save on a new retention value:

• The new retention value matches your privacy notice and your team's reporting cadence.
• You have noted the current value in case you need to roll back.
• If you are shrinking, you have exported the full current window to CSV.
• The Phone Taps feature is enabled (otherwise the change has no effect).
• You have informed teammates who rely on the dashboard about the upcoming change.
• The site's timezone is set correctly so cleanup runs at a sensible local time.

If every item is checked, save the new retention.

Scope

This reference covers phone tap retention and cleanup — the setting that controls how long call-tap records are stored before automatic deletion. It applies to any SGEN site with the Phone Taps feature enabled. It does not cover:

• How phone taps are recorded in the first place — covered in the Phone Taps recording guide.
• Exporting tap data to CSV — covered in the Downloads / Export guide.
• Privacy notice authoring — that is your responsibility; SGEN provides the data tool, not the legal text.
• Manual deletion of individual records — current SGEN only supports rolling-window retention, not per-record deletion.

Examples

Example 1: Setting a 90-day retention window. Your store manager opens Phone Taps → Settings, changes the retention from the default 365 days to 90 days, and saves. The next overnight cleanup removes records older than 90 days automatically.

Example 2: Exporting before shrinking the window. Your site owner wants to reduce retention from 180 days to 30 days but needs to preserve the historical data first. They export the current rolling window to CSV, verify the file has all rows, then change the retention setting. The old data is in the CSV; the live dashboard now shows only 30 days.

Example 3: Coordinating with a team member. Your site owner changes the retention from 365 to 60 days. They notify their support manager, who uses the tap dashboard weekly, so that person knows historical comparisons before the new date will no longer be available in the live dashboard.

Fields

Next steps

• Set up your Phone Taps recording if you have not turned the feature on yet — without recording, cleanup has nothing to do.
• Review your privacy notice to confirm the retention period is documented.
• Configure your CSV export schedule if you want a regular snapshot of the rolling window.
• Coordinate retention with your other analytics tools so all your visitor-data retention windows are consistent.
• Plan a quarterly review of your retention setting to confirm it still matches your reporting needs.