What are the retention settings for attachments?

tkp

I am a new user of SmartSheet and trying to weigh the risks and benefits of saving documents directly in SmartSheet versus shared drive folders (need to save them for compliance reasons).

~Are attachments saved to individual rows retained indefinitely?

~Are attachments viewable by anyone with access to the sheet (versus only the person who uploaded them)?

~Are attachments viewable/accessible even if the user who uploaded them is no longer an active user (e.g., changes roles or leaves the organization)?

~Do attachments have a habit of "disappearing"? There is a 5 year retention requirement for the regs we need to comply with so we need a very high level of confidence in the application's retention capabilities.

~If our organization were to stop using SmartSheet and transition to another software, is the data in our sheets, including the attachments, transferable?

Many thanks,

Tiffany

Paul Newcome

Attachments should not disappear, and I have never had (nor seen anyone else having) an issue with attachments mysteriously going missing.

They are viewable by anyone who has access to the sheet, but there are ways to control sheet access depending on your exact needs.

If someone leaves, the attachments stay exactly where they are since they are attached to wherever you attached them to. Just make sure the item (row/sheet/dashboard) doesn't get deleted and that no one deletes the actual attachment, and you should be fine.

If your organization leaves Smartsheet, you would need to download the attachments to a shared drive or possibly see if there is some kind of API connectivity that can help you transfer them over.

tkp

Thank you! This is great info - definitely helps us to make our decision.

Paul Newcome

Happy to help. 👍️