Retention & Export
Your data, your archives, your timeline
FSMA 204 requires food companies to maintain traceability records for at least two years. This page explains RegEngine's retention windows, export formats, and why you should maintain off-platform archives from day one.
Retention timeline
RegEngine retains data for the duration of your subscription plus a contract-defined post-cancellation export window. Specific durations are set in your commercial agreement.
Access to the active workspace and configured export functions during the subscription term. Backup and recovery posture depend on the active hosting configuration.
The post-cancellation export window is set by the active commercial agreement and operating workflow for the workspace.
Tenant data is scheduled for deletion from active systems after the contract-defined window. Provider backups, immutable logs, and disaster recovery copies expire on their normal cycles, and legal or regulatory holds may require longer retention.
Why off-platform archives matter
FSMA 204 requires 2-year retention
Under 21 CFR 1.1455, food companies must maintain traceability records for at least two years from the date they were created. RegEngine is a compliance evidence layer, not a long-term archive. Your subscription may not span two years from initial data ingestion, so off-platform retention remains your responsibility.
Vendor continuity risk
No vendor should be a single point of failure for regulatory records. Schedule recurring exports and store them in your own infrastructure from day one. If RegEngine is unavailable during an FDA investigation, your off-platform archives help support retrieval and retention obligations.
Export integrity verification
Export bundles are designed to include a SHA-256 manifest hash so records can be verified outside the product UI. Final artifact details depend on the export workflow configured for your deployment.
No vendor lock-in
Exports are intended to use industry-standard formats such as EPCIS 2.0 (Preview), FDA spreadsheet layouts, and CSV. Format coverage depends on the workflow enabled for your account.
Export formats
These are the export formats currently supported. Exact availability depends on plan, workflow, and deployment configuration.
Interoperable with other FSMA 204 platforms, trading partner systems, and FDA submissions
FDA-oriented sortable spreadsheet aligned to 21 CFR 1.1455 where applicable
For data warehouse import, internal analytics, or migration to another compliance tool
Complete export with SHA-256 manifest hash for tamper-evident archival and audit support
Export scheduling
Our recommendation
Set up weekly automated exports to your own object storage within the first week of onboarding. Use the audit evidence bundle format. It ships with a SHA-256 manifest so records can be verified out-of-band. Default deployments use PostgreSQL-backed task processing rather than a managed message bus. This supports FSMA 204's two-year retention requirement regardless of your RegEngine subscription status.