Glossary — Conservation period
What is a contractual conservation period?
Duration set in the contract during which an archive trustee preserves the deposited assets under the agreed rules (access, security, logging). It may be short (1 year) or long (10 years or more), adjustable to the nature of the assets, legal constraints and the signatories' decisions. At its end, an arbitration is held.
What it is
The conservation period is the archive's contractual horizon. It is written in years (or months for short cases) and sets the arbitration date at which the signatories will have to decide: extend, delete, or transfer the assets.
Several factors determine it:
- Statutory retention obligations: 10 years for accounting (French Commercial Code art. L. 123-22), 5 years for payroll, 5 years for commercial contracts, up to 30 years for some notarial deeds.
- The nature of the assets: an editorial site can justify long preservation (15-20 years), a tactical mailbox will rather be short (2-3 years after cessation).
- The case budget: cost being proportional to duration and volume, the period is decided by the signatories in light of the expected value.
Why it matters
The conservation period embodies a compromise between cost and risk. Too short, valuable items for later litigation or succession can be lost. Too long, data accumulate beyond justified need — GDPR risk, financial burden, exposure to format obsolescence. The right reflex is to reason by asset type, not as a single block.
How Archivum approaches it
The Archivum template contract makes it possible to define several periods within the same case: 5 years for the tactical mailbox, 10 years for accounting documents, 15 years for client deliverables under a transfer agreement. Each has its own end-of-period arbitration, its own group of decision-makers and its own voting rule. This modularity avoids block archiving which leads either to premature deletion or indefinite retention.