Deleting old responses Premium

Keeping responses only as long as you need them is good practice, and many privacy laws expect it. hootform can delete a form's old responses for you.

Setting a retention period

Open the form's Settings tab, choose Privacy, tick Delete responses after a number of days, and set Days to keep responses. By default, responses are kept forever.

• Days are counted from when a response was started, so abandoned partial responses are deleted on the same schedule as completed ones.
• Deletion runs every few hours, so a response may outlive its period by a few hours.
• Deleted responses are gone for good, along with the files respondents uploaded to them. This can't be undone, so export anything you want to keep first.
• Shortening the period deletes everything older than the new period at the next run.
• AI insights reports are deleted whenever responses are, since they quote them.

Only workspace editors can change it.

Deleting by hand

Editors can delete a single response from its drawer in the Responses tab. Deleting a form deletes all of its responses and files.

Insights only count responses that still exist, so deleting responses changes the numbers. Page views are counted separately and aren't affected.