Deleting your data, and your customers' data

Three different requests

They get mixed up constantly, and they have different answers.

1. You uninstall the app

Your backup is kept for 25 days and then erased. The delay is deliberate: apps get uninstalled by accident, and a merchant who reinstalls the same week should find their history intact rather than starting from zero.

2. You want it gone now

Settings, Erase everything. We email a confirmation link to your store contact address in Shopify; following it destroys your store's encryption key immediately, which makes every stored copy unreadable at once, and removes the records.

This cannot be undone by us or by anyone else, so export first if you want a copy. Erasing also stops the backup for good - to start over, remove the app and install it again.

One honest detail about our own disaster recovery: encrypted key-escrow copies of encryption keys expire within 7 days, cannot be decrypted on our servers, and keys of erased stores are excluded from any restore we perform.

3. A customer asks you to delete their data

Use the customer privacy request in your Shopify admin. Shopify forwards it to every installed app including us, and we remove that person from every stored snapshot - rewriting the affected files, not just hiding the record. You do not need to write to us: the request arrives automatically, and the access log in the app shows when we acted on it.

That is narrower than erasing your whole backup and leaves the rest of your history untouched.

Why deletion takes a moment on our side

Stored objects sit under a storage lock that refuses deletion for the first 20 days. That rule exists so that neither a bug on our side nor a stolen key can wipe a merchant's backup early - and it is why erasure destroys the key first: from that second the data is unreadable, and the physical object leaves as soon as the lock allows.

Export files are outside that lock, because they are promised to disappear after 7 days and they do.

The full policy is in privacy, and how the encryption works is in security.