About Webex App free account retention policy

[Francisco Zicre]

We received a mail from Cisco saying:

We wanted to let you know our Webex App (formerly known as Webex Teams) retention policies have changed. If you have a free Webex App account, your User-Generated content (including messages, files, whiteboards, giphys, and more) is now subject to a 6-month retention period. All content in your account that is more than 6 months old will be deleted permanently and cannot be recovered.

You can find more information in our Privacy Data Sheet

We understand that this may disrupt your workflow, so we're giving you an extra 30 days from today to back up your data. Please backup any content you wish to retain within 30 days to avoid losing it permanently.

To upgrade your account and retain all of your content without limits, please explore plans today!

I know it only applies for the free accounts, but our providers and some external users use them.

So my questions is if the messages algo get deleted after the 6 month retention period.

Thanks in advance.

[dtibbe · Accepted solution]

The question was just answered in a German Webex space. Basically the following:

The data retention of a space is determined by the space owner. Ie. if it was created by a free user, the content will be deleted after 6 months. If the space was created by a paid subscription user and the free user is just space member, then the content will remain.

1:1 spaces are special, i.e. the retention policy of each participant will be applied (free's data will be deleted after 6 months, paid will remain longer).

[Tympos]

It would be great if we could pay just for the retention. I don't need anything else from the paid subscription, but I would like to have a retention for as long as I want. This could be eg half the price of a subscription. This is a bit annoying, however when it's free you just can not complain I guess...

[Fritz_H]

@Francisco Zicre 
I am also using a free account and I think this part seems to answer your question:

"...your User-Generated content (including messages, files, whiteboards, giphys, and more) is now subject to a 6-month retention period. All content in your account that is more than 6 months old will be deleted permanently"

[Tympos]

Dear sir, since you have a free account and more than 6 months have passed since your reply, could you please inform us about what happened to the content of your free account.

1. Is everything deleted or anything that is older than 6 months? For example in a space, do the newer messages remain, or the whole space gets deleted?

2. Do you get any notification prior to the deletion?

3. Have you successfully backed up any messages?

[dtibbe]

I'm wondering if this will also affect messages that were posted in a public space.. That would be bad IMHO..

[Francisco Zicre]

 That means if you created a space as a free user with other people, including users with paid accounts in it , gets deleted?

Is there a possibility to backup messages/spaces/groups?

[dtibbe]

You may create an app for yourself to fetch all messages utilizing https://developer.webex.com/docs/api/v1/messages

And you may also ask Cisco to get a copy of your data based on a GDRP request

[Francisco Zicre]

Thanks!, i will try to do an app for that.