# Data Retention Policy

CopyStorm provides a robust data retention facility that allows Salesforce records to be recoverable at virtually any point in time, and provides a lot of flexibility in establishing a data retention policy. What is a data retention policy? A data retention policy is a set of practices that retain historical corporate data for a specified period of time and, in the case of databases, allows historical data to be restored. A good data retention policy supports tasks like “Restore this data to how it was last Wednesday”.

There are two ways to configure a data retention policy within CopyStorm:

* Using CopyStorm’s built-in “Default Point-In-Time” Snapshot Policy to capture virtually any record change that may be needed for restoration later.
* Creating a custom data retention Snapshot data source, capturing a targeted subset of data for later restoration.

The rest of this document provides information useful for setting up CopyStorm’s built-in “Default Point-In-Time” Snapshot Policy. For more comprehensive details on how to configure a custom Snapshot Policy to suit specific data retention needs, please see the documentation for [CopyStorm’s Snapshot tab](/reference/archive-tab.md).

## Configuring CopyStorm’s Default Point-In-Time Snapshot Policy

CopyStorm’s built-in “Default Point-In-Time” Snapshot Policy is preconfigured to record all data changes that may be required for recovery.

To enable CopyStorm’s “Default Point-In-Time” Snapshot Policy:

1. Go to CopyStorm’s Snapshot tab.
2. Click on the “Edit” link for the Default Point-In-Time Snapshot Policy.
3. Select the “Active” checkbox.
   * This will enable the snapshot, after being enabled CopyStorm will automatically capture record changes in the Default Point-In-Time data source.
4. Set the # Days to Retain record changes.
   * All record changes will be stored in the database for the specified number of days.
5. Save changes.

![](/files/WmIsMOOD1JJFwzk0xGi2)

![](/files/EIeDAetMqQs0CxeySqmi)


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