Ask HN: How are you handling data retention across your stack?

For people building SaaS with data across multiple systems (S3, DBs, caches, etc), do you actually have a clean way to manage retention/deletion across all of them? (Especially when each customer has custom policies)

Or is it more a mix of lifecycle rules, cron jobs, and manual cleanup?

How are you doing this today? I feel like this is a blocker in enterprise deals when selling to regulated industries.

2 points | by preston-kwei 16 hours ago

2 comments

  • muzani 1 hour ago
    I feel like this should be a service in itself, similar to Heroku or Supabase. Just tick which laws you want to adhere to, upload files to their buckets. Tick another box for audit logs and such and it'll ask you where you need your human in the loop and which buttons those humans need to press. So a bit like Carta or Deel in that sense.

    I've had some big enterprise deals fall through because of something like this - military, insurance, fintech, etc.

  • crawlwright 14 hours ago
    Mostly cron jobs and lifecycle rules in my experience, it’s rarely clean. S3 lifecycle policies handle the easy stuff but anything touching multiple systems usually ends up as a scheduled job that someone wrote once and nobody fully trusts.