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I have archiving enabled for session recordings, what happens in PWS when I delete recordings from the archive?

  • January 27, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 33 views

We have Session Recording Archiving enabled and is working as designed. What happens when (if) I delete recordings from the Archive? Is there a dead link in PWS? Would be interested if anyone has a procedure they use to delete the recordings, say after 12 months. Would like to NOT see any references to the sessions once they are deleted from Archive.

Best answer by ThorbenM

Deleting session recordings will create orphaned sessions that cannot be restored. In most cases, you can safely delete archived recordings older than 365 days (depending on your retention policy) and simply ignore the corresponding entries in the completed‑sessions list - but only if your policy allows that information to be stored indefinitely.

There are also multiple ideas in the ideas portal (please upvote 😉):
Delete Session Records after 5 or 10 | All Product Ideas - Public
Data Retention Purge Recorded Sessions | All Product Ideas - Public
Purge Archived Recorded Sessions after a | All Product Ideas - Public
...

3 replies

  • Apprentice
  • Answer
  • January 28, 2026

Deleting session recordings will create orphaned sessions that cannot be restored. In most cases, you can safely delete archived recordings older than 365 days (depending on your retention policy) and simply ignore the corresponding entries in the completed‑sessions list - but only if your policy allows that information to be stored indefinitely.

There are also multiple ideas in the ideas portal (please upvote 😉):
Delete Session Records after 5 or 10 | All Product Ideas - Public
Data Retention Purge Recorded Sessions | All Product Ideas - Public
Purge Archived Recorded Sessions after a | All Product Ideas - Public
...


  • Author
  • Apprentice
  • January 28, 2026
  • ThorbenM--Thanks for your reply. And thanks for the link to the Ideas Portal. Any ideas about how to remove the orphaned session references in PWS? Would seem a DB Query could work-but would need to know the correct table 


  • Apprentice
  • January 30, 2026

@EAKG - the problem is that the sessions are referenced in many other tables which makes deleting it quite complex. Id say if you have the requirement to delete the entries you should open a support case at beyondtrust. They came up with some clever sql queries for me in the past that were doing exactly that. :) Good luck!