How long we keep things

When you delete a recipe, a cookbook or a gathering, it is marked as deleted and stops appearing anywhere in the product. The record itself is kept. That is deliberate: a deletion you did not mean is common, and a record that is merely marked can be put back, while one that is gone cannot.

Photographs and recordings are stored separately from the recipes and gatherings that show them. When nothing is left pointing at a stored file — the recipe that used it was deleted, a draft was abandoned, a picture was replaced — that file becomes an orphan, and it costs something to keep forever.

A nightly job looks for those files. A file with no live reference is kept for at least 30 days after the last thing that used it went away, and only then becomes eligible to be cleaned up. Anything the job cannot confidently match to something is left alone: it is written to prefer keeping a file it does not understand over deleting one somebody wanted.

Because a deletion is a mark rather than an erasure, the record survives — but there is no button in the product today that puts a deleted recipe, cookbook or gathering back. Deleting one is, in practice, final from where you are sitting, and asking a person is the only route.

A deleted account is different: signing back in during the grace period offers to restore it, and doing so brings the account and its content back together.

When an order is paid for, the book is frozen exactly as it was: every page, every picture, every word. That frozen copy and the print files made from it are never cleaned up by any of the above, and a reorder reproduces the same book.

This holds even if you later delete the original recipe. A picture inside a book somebody paid for is kept because it is part of that book, not because of where it came from.

If you ask for something to be removed, the picture stops being served: the link it was reachable through is revoked, and it disappears from the pages that carried it.

The file itself is retained rather than destroyed. That is what keeps a mistaken removal reversible — a removal made in error can be undone, and one made correctly stays in force because the link is dead. It is the same posture described on the removal page.

Photographs are kept at the resolution you gave us. Nothing replaces an original with a smaller version — it is what a printed book is made from, and what a family archive is for.

For photographs added to a gathering, a smaller copy is made alongside the original so pages load quickly, and that copy is what a browser downloads. The original stays exactly as it was.

Nothing here is a one-way door. From Settings you can build a single file holding everything you have written, with your photographs (the archive carries a limited number of photographs — the file names any it left out), and download it — as often as you like, whether or not you ever intend to leave.

A family box is exported by the family: any current member can take a copy of the whole box, which is what lets a family archive outlive any one account — including the account that started it.