Retention, decided on purpose
How long should you keep client video files?
There is no standard. There are five clocks.
Anyone who gives you a single number is guessing. What actually exists is a set of clocks that run at different speeds on every job: the contract, the re-cut, the tax records, the licences, and the platform you were quietly treating as an archive. Name the five, pick your numbers, write them down. It takes an afternoon.
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Updated September 2026
The honest answer first
Nobody sets the period for you,
so it gets decided by whichever drive fills up first.
There is no industry-standard retention period for client video. No regulator publishes one, no professional body agrees on one, and anyone who tells you the number is seven years, or three, or forever, is quoting a habit rather than a rule.
This is a business decision that most filmmakers make by accident. The decision gets made on the afternoon a drive fills up, in a hurry, with a client email unanswered in another window. That is why the answer is almost always either “we still have everything since 2014” or “I think that one is gone.” Both are the same failure: no policy.
What exists instead of a standard is five clocks. They run at different speeds, they start on different days, and only one of them is under your control. Name them, put a number against each, and you have a retention policy. The rest of this page is those five clocks and the policy we would write if you handed us the afternoon.
Clock one
The contract clock
if it says anything at all.
Whatever the delivery agreement says. Most delivery agreements say nothing, which means the client assumes forever and you assume until it is inconvenient. Those two assumptions meet in an email three years later, and the person holding the drive loses.
A retention clause is three sentences and it settles the whole argument in advance: how long you keep files, in what form, and what it costs to bring them back. Put it in the delivery agreement, not in the invoice, and not in a reply to a request. Here is one you can paste and edit.
A retention clause to add to your delivery agreement
Retention. We keep the delivered master and the project files for twelve months from the date of final delivery. Archived files are kept in their delivered form and may be held offline, so restoring them is not immediate. After the retention period, files may be deleted without further notice. Restoring files after final delivery is billable at the rate in force at the time of the request. The Client is responsible for keeping their own copy of the delivered files.
Twelve months is our suggestion, not a standard. Set the number you can actually honour on your worst month, because a clause you break is worse than no clause. And notice what the last sentence does: it moves the client from assuming your archive is their backup to knowing it is not, on the day they are paying attention.
Clock two
The re-cut clock
and it is genre-dependent.
How long a client plausibly comes back wanting a change. This is the clock people think they are answering when they ask how long to keep files, and it has no single answer because a campaign, an explainer, a wedding and a documentary all age at different speeds.
These are editorial judgements, not a standard, and nothing in this table comes from a survey or a regulation. The useful part is the shape: pick the event that ends the job's usefulness, add one cycle, and write that number into your policy per genre rather than per drive.
The re-cut clock is also the only clock with a revenue argument attached. A client who can get a new cutdown next quarter is a client who does not go out to tender for it. That is worth more than the storage, which is why the honest version of this clock is usually longer than the one your drive is voting for.
Clock three
The legal and tax clock
set by your jurisdiction, not by us.
Some records have to be kept for a fixed period, and the period is written by a tax authority, not by a video industry. Two authorities publish a figure we could fetch and quote today. If yours is not one of them, this page has no number for you, and that is the honest version.
IRS and GOV.UK pages fetched 9 September 2026; see sources. Read the scope carefully: these rules govern business records, meaning contracts, invoices, releases and the ledger, and they are written about paperwork rather than about master files. Whether a delivered video counts as a business record where you file is a question for your accountant. Cite this clock for the paperwork, and do not let it silently become your excuse for keeping eleven terabytes of rushes.
Clock four
The rights clock
and it is the one nobody counts.
Music licences, stock licences and talent releases expire. The file does not expire with them. A master kept past the licence that made it legal is not an asset sitting quietly on a shelf: it is a liability with a play button.
Music and stock
A term licence covers a use, a territory and a period. When the period ends, the delivered film is still on your drive, still on a link, and still embeddable by anyone who saved the URL. Keeping the file is fine. Continuing to publish it is the part the licence had an opinion about.
Talent and location releases
Releases can be limited in time, in medium or in territory, and some carry a right to withdraw. The person who signed one two years ago is not tracking your archive. If your policy does not record what each film is cleared for, nobody in your company knows.
What to do about it
Keep a plain text manifest beside every archived project listing the licences it carries and the date each one ends. Then the retention question stops being about disk space and becomes a date you can sort by, and an expiring licence prompts a decision instead of a surprise.
This clock is the reason a retention policy should say what happens at the end, not just how long. Deleting a file is one option. Unpublishing it while keeping the master is usually the better one, because the risk lives in the link, not in the bytes.
Clock five
The platform clock,
and you do not control it.
If your retention plan is “it is on the platform,” then your retention period is the length of your subscription. This is not a prediction. Both of the platforms below have already published what happens next, in their own words.
Vimeo help centre and Google Drive help pages fetched 9 September 2026; see sources. Neither policy is unreasonable and neither is hidden. The point is narrower: a hosting subscription is a delivery surface with a published end state, so it can be part of a retention plan but it cannot be the whole of one.
The test is simple. If the card on file expired tonight and nobody noticed for a year, what would you still have? Whatever survives that question is your archive. Everything else is a subscription.
The afternoon
The policy to write,
four numbers and one sentence.
A retention policy does not need a document management system. It needs four decisions you apply the same way on every job, and one sentence you send with every delivery.
Delete on delivery day
Proxies, render caches, autosaves, conform copies, one-off review transcodes and culled takes. All of it is regenerable and none of it is the film. This is the cheapest storage win available and it happens while you still remember what everything was for.
A default period for the project
One number for the working set: rushes, selects, session files. Twelve months from final delivery is a defensible default, adjusted per genre using the re-cut clock. Write the number down; a number you can honour beats a number that sounds generous.
A small set kept indefinitely
The delivered master, every deliverable you handed over, the project file with its used media, and a manifest. It is a fraction of the job's total size, and it is the part that makes a re-cut, a reel, a legal answer or a re-delivery possible years later.
A note to the client at delivery
One sentence, in writing, every time. It sets the expectation while they are reading, rather than three years later when they are not. Put it in the delivery email, not only in the contract, because the delivery email is the one they keep.
The sentence to send with every delivery
Your final files are attached and linked below. We keep a copy of the master and the project for twelve months from today, after which they may be deleted. Please download these files and keep your own copy: our archive is a courtesy, not a guarantee, and it is not a substitute for your backup.
The strongest recommendation on this page
Tell the client, in writing, at delivery,
to keep their own copy.
If you take one thing from this page, take this one. Every other clock is a number you can adjust later. This one is a sentence that costs nothing and prevents the single worst conversation in client video work.
The conversation goes like this. Three years after the job, an email arrives asking for the film, and either you no longer have it or you have it and never agreed to store it. There is no good version of that exchange. There is only the version where you said, in writing, on delivery day, what you would keep and for how long, and the version where you did not.
The photographer’s and the filmmaker’s archive is a courtesy. It is not a guarantee, it is not a service the client bought, and it is not covered by a professional standard because there is not one. Saying that at delivery, plainly and without apology, is not defensive. It is the thing that makes your twelve-month policy hold, because the client heard it at the moment they were paying attention rather than at the moment they needed the file.
It also sells the alternative. A client who is told their copy matters is a client who might buy longer retention as a line item, which is a better business than storing everything for free and hoping nobody asks.
Our side of it
Keeping the master
without keeping it hot.
Most of what makes a retention policy expensive is keeping finished work in the tier that is priced for playback. Cold storage is the tier for files nobody is watching, and here it is part of two plans rather than a separate console.
Cold storage is on Max and Studio only. The re-hydration allowance is twice your cold pool per calendar month and resets on the 1st, so it grows if you add cold blocks. Archiving frees the hot space immediately, and a restore is verified by size on arrival. Full arithmetic, including how a year of finished work prices out hot, cold and split, is on the hot versus cold guide.
The shape that fits the policy above: the delivered cut stays hot, because that is the file a client clicks and the one your reel points at. The master and the selects go cold the day the grade is approved, because they are the copy a re-cut needs and nobody watches in between. The rushes stay on the local disks and the RAID the edit ran from, because that is the cheapest storage you own. The hot versus cold guide has the arithmetic for a full year of work.
One thing this page will not tell you, because we have no published policy to quote at you: what happens to files after an account ends. Ask that question of every platform you store work on, ours included, and get the answer in writing before you call any of them your archive. That is the same test the platform clock above applies to everyone else, and it would be dishonest to exempt ourselves from it.
Questions
Frequently asked
Is there a legal minimum for keeping client video files?
Not one that names video. What exists is record-keeping law for business records, and it differs by country. The IRS tells United States filers to keep records for 3 years in the general case, 6 years if unreported income is more than 25 percent of the gross income shown on the return, and employment tax records for at least 4 years. HMRC tells self-employed filers in the United Kingdom to keep records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year. Those rules govern the paperwork of a job: the contract, the invoice, the release. Whether a delivered master counts as a business record in your jurisdiction is a question for your accountant, and we will not answer it for you.
How long do most video companies actually keep footage?
We do not know, and we will not invent a figure. There is no survey we can point at and no professional body that publishes a standard. That absence is the whole reason this page exists: because nobody sets the period for you, the period gets set by whichever drive fills up first. A written policy, even an aggressive one, beats an accidental one.
What should I delete the moment a job is delivered?
Proxies, render caches, autosave folders, conform copies, transcodes made for one review, and the takes you culled during the assembly. None of it is the film and none of it is expensive to make again. Deleting it on delivery day is the single fastest way to get a drive back, and it costs you nothing you would miss.
What is cheap enough to keep forever?
Four things: the delivered master, every deliverable you actually handed over including captions and cutdowns, the project file with its used media, and a plain text manifest listing what exists, where it is and what licences it carries. On most jobs that set is a small fraction of what was shot, and it is the set that makes a re-cut possible three years later.
The film is on Vimeo or in Drive. Is that my archive?
Only for as long as you keep paying, and both platforms publish what happens next. Vimeo states that if a paid membership lapses to Basic, source files stored on Vimeo will be deleted after 60 days and cannot be recovered, with the HD and SD versions remaining available. Google states that if you are over your storage quota for 2 years, it might delete your content across Gmail, Drive and Photos. A hosting account is a delivery surface. An archive is a copy you would still have if the card on file expired.
What happens to a master I move to cold storage here?
It stops doing everything except existing: no stream, no embed, no review room, until you bring it back. Archiving frees the hot space immediately, and a restore is verified by size on arrival. The re-hydration allowance is twice your cold pool per calendar month and resets on the 1st, so a Max plan with its included terabyte of cold can bring back 2 TB in a month.
Can I charge a client to bring an old project back?
Yes, if you wrote it down before the job started. A retention clause that names the period, the form the files are kept in, and the restore fee turns a favour into a line item. Added after the fact it is an argument, so put it in the delivery agreement now and let the next three years pay for themselves.
Keep the master without keeping it hot
Cold storage is included on Max and Studio: 1 TB of cold with Max, 2 TB with Studio, and $20 per TB a month beyond that. Archiving frees the hot space immediately, and a cold master does not stream, embed or review until you bring it back.
Sources
- 1.Vimeo Help Center: FAQ, lapsing from a paid account to a Basic account (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 2.Google Drive Help: what happens when you reach or exceed your storage quota (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 3.Internal Revenue Service: How long should I keep records (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 4.GOV.UK: Self-employed records, how long to keep your records (fetched 9 September 2026)
- 5.uncompressed.io pricing: plans, included hot and cold storage, block rates