# Automatically Delete Inactive Contacts By default, DM Champ keeps a contact and their conversation history until you delete them. If your privacy policy, your industry, or a customer's data-protection review asks you to keep personal data only for as long as you need it, you can put that on a timer: pick a period, and any contact who has had no activity for longer than that is deleted automatically, together with their messages. This is the **storage limitation** principle from the GDPR in practice: you decide the retention period, and the platform enforces it for you every day. --- ## How to Turn It On **How to get there:** Settings → **Advanced** group → **Data Export** → **Data retention** card. 1. Open **Settings** (gear icon in the left sidebar). 2. In the Settings menu, click **Data Export** under the **Advanced** group. 3. In the **Data retention** card at the top, open **Delete inactive contacts after** and pick a period: **30 days**, **90 days**, **180 days**, **1 year**, **2 years**, or **Custom** for any number of days between 30 and 3650. 4. Click **Save** and confirm. ::: master-only
The Data Export settings page with the Data retention card at the top: a Delete inactive contacts after dropdown set to Off, and a Save button

The Data retention card sits above the export flow. It is Off for every account until you switch it on.

::: Turning it on, or shortening the period, asks you to confirm first, because the deletion cannot be undone. Turning it off or lengthening the period saves straight away. > **Only the account owner can change this.** Team members see the setting but cannot save it, even with settings permissions. --- ## What Counts as Inactive A contact is inactive when nothing has happened on their conversation for longer than the period you chose: no message in either direction, no note, no update to the contact. The clock runs from the contact's last activity, or from the day they were created if they never had any. The clean-up runs once a day. On each run, it skips a contact if: - They have an **appointment in the future**. - They are in the middle of a **follow-up sequence** or an active campaign. Everything else that is past the cut-off is deleted: the contact record, their full conversation history across all channels, and the summaries, tasks, deals, appointments and analytics tied to them. This is the same deletion as removing the contact by hand, so anything you deleted from the live systems clears out of backups within 90 days. Very large clean-ups are spread across several days: each run deletes up to 5,000 contacts per account, so switching the timer on for a long-standing account does not remove everything in one go. --- ## Knowing What Was Deleted - The card shows when the clean-up last ran and how many contacts it removed. - After any run that deleted at least one contact you receive a notification in the app. - If a run could not complete, the reason is shown on the card and the contacts are left in place until the next run. If you want a copy before the timer starts, request an export first: see [Download Your Data](data-export.md). --- ## Sub-Accounts and Agencies The setting is per account. An agency's own choice does not carry over to its sub-accounts, and each sub-account owner sets their own period. --- ## Next Steps - [Where Your Data Is Stored](data-hosting-and-retention.md) — the full picture of retention, hosting and sub-processors. - [Download Your Data](data-export.md) — take a copy before the timer removes anything.