Panopto Retention Policy

The University of Arizona’s Panopto account has a content retention (archival) policy in place to archive videos that haven’t been viewed for a certain time period. Archived videos are not available for immediate viewing, but creators or viewers of the videos can still restore them from archive for viewing access. It’s important to note that this is NOT a deletion policy. No videos are being deleted with this policy. They get placed in an archived status. Videos in an archived status are not able to be viewed until they are restored. 

What is the policy? 

Any Panopto video that has not been viewed in the last 13 months will be put in an archive status. If a video has never been viewed then the policy looks at the video’s creation date.  

What Panopto content does this policy apply to? 

This content retention policy has been applied to all content that resides inside a Brightspace course Panopto folder as well as content that resides in a user’s personal “My Folder”. 

Why is there a need for this content retention policy?

The University of Arizona has created more than 1,000,000 videos focused on helping students with course materials and concepts. To help ensure we are both meeting the needs of faculty and students along with fiscal responsibility, we have begun leveraging Amazon Web Service’s Glacial Storage through Panopto’s archiving process. When no one has viewed a video for 13 months, it will be archived. If at any point a student, staff, or faculty member wants to view an archived video then they can simply select a “restore” button and the video will be available for playing within 24-48 hours. 

How does an individual restore a Panopto video from the archive?

There are several ways that a Panopto video can be restored. Panopto’s How to Restore Archived Content (opens in a new tab) support page goes into great detail about those methods.

The main two ways that most users would restore a Panopto video is from within the Panopto folder itself, or from attempting to view an archived video from within the Panopto Viewer or the Panopto Embedded Viewer. Learn how to restore archived content by viewing our Restore Archived Content help page.

Note

  • When a video is archived, the permissions are kept intact, and as such, Viewers will only be able to see the archived videos they have access to and must be authenticated in order to view them.
  • Archived videos can remain in the Archive indefinitely but must be restored before they can be viewed.
    • Restoration of an archived video can take up to 48 hours (our experience is that it restores much quicker than this).
    • All users can restore a video for viewing, as long as they have appropriate permissions to the video. 
  •  Archived videos will no longer appear when browsing the library, but will still appear in search results.
    • Archived videos will still be associated with a folder, but will not display within that folder list view. 
    • If a video is restored, it will appear in its associated folder once it is ready to view. 
    • Archived videos will appear in search results for any user who has been given access to the videos per the sharing setting in Panopto. Note: This means that archived videos that were shared publicly will be searchable by unauthenticated users.