How SNAP helps rental car companies and shuttle operators accomplish compliance and cost control using configurable data retention and automated cleanup.
Introduction
Vehicle documentation has a lifecycle. You need recent snaps for dispute resolution and customer service; older snaps may be required for compliance or audit. But keeping everything forever drives up storage costs and can create compliance headaches.
SNAP’s retention policy lets you set how many years to keep snaps per organization. Once configured, a daily job runs cleanup: it identifies snaps older than the retention cutoff, deletes the database records, and removes the associated images from Azure Blob Storage. Sys admins receive a summary email after each run with counts per organization. No manual cleanup, no orphaned blobs.
This guide covers how to configure retention, what gets cleaned up, how the summary works, and best practices for setting retention periods.
Why This Feature Matters — Compliance and Cost Control
- Compliance: Align retention with your regulatory or audit requirements.
- Cost control: Reduce Azure Blob Storage costs by removing old data automatically.
- Automation: No manual deletion; the system handles it on a schedule.
- Visibility: Sys admin summary emails show what was deleted and what remains.
- Per-organization: Each org can have its own retention period.
What You Get When You Use This Feature
Your Workflow
- Configure retention: Set retention years for each organization in Sys Admin or Org Admin > Organization settings.
- Let the job run: A daily Hangfire job processes all orgs with retention configured.
- Review summaries: Sys admins receive an email with cleanup stats per org.
- Monitor remaining data: Summary includes remaining snap count and oldest snap date.
What the Feature Produces
- Cleanup: Deletion of snaps older than the retention cutoff, plus their images and Azure Blob blobs.
- Summary email: Per-org stats: snaps deleted, images deleted, blobs deleted, remaining count, cutoff date.
- Audit trail: Logging of cleanup runs for troubleshooting.
Understanding the Results
Retention Cleanup Summary
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Snaps Deleted | Number of snap records removed |
| Images Deleted | Number of image records removed |
| Blobs Deleted | Number of Azure Blob Storage blobs removed |
| Remaining Snaps Count | Snaps still in the system after cleanup |
| Cutoff Date | Date before which snaps were deleted |
| Retention Years | Configured retention period |
Retention Policy
- Retention years: Set per organization (e.g., 1, 2, 5, 7 years).
- Cutoff: Snaps with creation date before
today - retention yearsare eligible for deletion. - Batch processing: Cleanup runs in configurable batches to avoid long-running transactions.
Reports and Deliverables
- Email summary: Sys admins receive retention cleanup summary emails after each run.
- No exports: Cleanup is destructive; ensure retention is set correctly before enabling.
Best Practices
- Align with compliance: Check your industry or regulatory requirements before setting retention periods.
- Start conservative: If unsure, set a longer retention (e.g., 7 years) and shorten later.
- Review summary emails: Use them to verify cleanup is running and to spot anomalies.
- Consider litigation holds: If you have holds, ensure retention doesn’t delete required data before holds are lifted.
- Test in staging: Run retention cleanup in a non-production environment to validate behavior before deploying.
Conclusion
SNAP’s configurable retention and automated cleanup keep your data lifecycle under control. Set retention once, and the system handles the rest—with clear visibility for sys admins. Explore the Organization settings to configure retention for your organization.
The post Configurable Data Retention: A Complete Guide to Compliance and Cost Control first appeared on C2IT Labs.