Automatic housekeeping

A weekly automatic sweep clears residue that deletion actions elsewhere don’t touch directly — deleted-draft photos, orphaned files, and EDI exports past their retention window.

What it is

Four housekeeping effects your organisation may notice, none of which need any action from you: a deleted draft survey’s photos and heavy content are cleared from storage roughly 30 days after deletion, while a stripped-down record — id, deletion reason, timestamps — is kept as history; any storage file left behind by an interrupted upload against a since-deleted draft is cleaned up alongside it; an unclaimed contractor shell that’s sat idle for 180 days with no work ever assigned to it is flagged to the landlord who created it for review, never auto-deleted; and EDI export files older than 90 days are deleted from storage, while the run record itself — day, record count, trigger — is kept and shown as expired rather than downloadable.

How to do it

There is nothing to configure or trigger — this runs automatically, every week, in the background. The only visible effects are the four described above.

How it integrates

None of this touches sealed evidence — a finalised survey or remediation record is never affected by any of these sweeps; the only route to removing sealed evidence at all is deleting the whole organisation (see Deleting the organisation). A deleted draft’s tombstone — the stripped-down record kept as history — is what “cleared” means in every article that uses the word: the heavy content and photos are gone, but the record’s existence, its deletion reason, and who deleted it are not. That is not the same claim as the record being recorded as zero, or as never having existed.

Common problems

• I deleted a draft weeks ago and its photos still show as pending in an old export or link. Check the age against roughly 30 days — before that point, deletion has been recorded but the housekeeping sweep that actually clears the storage files hasn’t run yet.
• An EDI export file from months ago won’t download anymore. Files past 90 days are removed from storage automatically; the run itself still shows in your EDI history, marked as expired, as a record that it happened.
• A contractor we added but never actually used got flagged as idle. That’s expected once 180 days pass with no work assigned to it — it’s a review prompt, not a removal; claim it, assign it work, or remove it yourself if it’s no longer needed.