The visible window: three months
The Recycle Bin page defaults to a date range covering the last three months — the backend uses $defaultDateStart = date('Y-m-d', strtotime('-3 months')) to filter the query. Items deleted before that window are excluded from the table on screen.
This is a display limit, not a deletion limit. The underlying soft-deleted rows are still there, marked with their *_deleted flag. Nothing automatically removes them from the database.
No automatic purge
The system does not run a cron job that hard-deletes old soft-deleted rows. That means:
- Storage for deleted items grows over time, but stays small relative to the live data set.
- If you need to recover something deleted four months ago or five years ago, the data is still there — it just is not surfaced through the Recycle Bin UI.
- If you are concerned about a specific deletion (e.g. an audit requirement), contact support and we can restore it directly from the database.
Best practice
Restore the item as soon as you realise it shouldn't have been deleted. While the three-month window is generous, the user who deleted it remembers the context best when it is recent. After three months you will need to remember the exact name, date or id to identify it for a support-led recovery.
If your team frequently deletes items they later need back, consider using Archive (where available) instead — archiving keeps the item out of active lists without flagging it as deleted at all.
