Sitebulb Cloud implements an auto-archive feature, and you can also optionally archive audit data manually.
Archiving on Sitebulb Cloud
If you have a Sitebulb Cloud subscription, your data is backed up securely every hour, so there is very little chance of data loss.
Additionally, your audit data is archived at a fixed point in time after the audit is completed, determined by the schedule of the Project each audit belongs to.
By default, your audits are archived within these timeframes:
Daily Projects - audits archived after 30 days
Weekly Projects - audits archived after 60 days
Fortnightly (bi-weekly) Projects - audits archived after 90 days
Monthly Projects - audits archived after 110 days
Quarterly Projects - audits archived after 276 days
Ad-hoc audits (with no recurring schedule) adopt the settings of daily scheduled projects.
Once an audit is archived, the audit data will no longer be immediately accessible.
Archived audits look like this:
The newest audit in any Project will not be archived, regardless of how long ago it was completed, so you always have access to the latest data.
Archiving Audits Manually
In addition to the automatic archiving, you may also decide you wish to manually archive an audit, which you can do by pressing the Archive button alongside the audit listing within the Project.
Unarchiving audit data
If you need access to an archived audit, simply press the Unarchive button alongside the audit in question.
Sitebulb will fetch the archived data, which will be available for you to view as soon as it has been completed.
Unarchiving may take longer for larger Audits, so allow Sitebulb up to 30 minutes to retrieve the data.
Deleting audit data
Archived audit data will be retained for 3 years after the last archive date. After this point, the data will be deleted and will become permanently unavailable.
If you choose to delete audit or project data, this will also permanently delete the data from your cloud server and it will be permanently unavailable:
It will be deleted from the backup permanently
If it has not yet been archived, it will not be archived
If it has already been archived, it will be deleted from the archive
Only delete audit or project data you are sure you no longer need.
Adjusting archiving settings
The default archiving settings will work well for most teams. However, you may need to change these timeframes according to your team’s workflows.
The Cloud Server Admin user can adjust the archiving cadence through the Server Settings, where you can adjust any of these values (e.g. updating the Weekly schedule from 60 days to 80 days):
These changes take 5 to 10 minutes to take effect, and they have no effect on audits that have already been archived (i.e. previous audits will not get unarchived if you increase the number of days to wait).
IMPORTANT NOTE
Your cloud server has a finite amount of resources. The archiving system is in place so that for audits you probably don't need instant access to go into the 'deep freeze', and the actual audit database is removed from your cloud server.
It may be tempting to increase all the archive settings up to, for example, 365 days. Whilst the system will allow you to do this, you will likely find that this causes the hard disk on your cloud server to fill up, which might mean you are unable to run new audits.