Ask HN: Does your company delete old data or keep them forever?

At a previous company, we usually had requirements to keep customer data for X amount of years with the client we worked for, so it could be audited or checked during that time, and then after that we had to delete it, which meant we had a script that would replace any sensitive and identifying data (name, phone number, address, etc) with 'XXXXXXXXX'.

Outside of that, we usually hung on to data. We still had databases sitting there for clients we hadn't done any work with for over five years.

But there was always a chance we'd secure more work with them, and if that happened we wouldn't have to go through the setup process all over again, plus it would take a decent amount of time to remove them entirely from all of our systems that management didn't really want to spend the manpower doing.