History and kept items
Relic holds two kinds of thing. History is everything you copied and never did anything else with. It is a rolling window: new copies come in at one end and old ones fall out the other. Kept items are the ones you put in your Vault, by pressing the keep shortcut, by saving them from the window, or by turning on save everything. They never fall out, whatever the window is set to and however old they get.
So the answer to "how long does Relic keep this?" is: forever if you kept it, and until the window rolls past it if you did not. The Vault covers how to keep something.
Keep recent history
The size of the window is the Settings › Vault and storage › Keep recent history row.
What the row offers depends on how this computer is set up. Signed in to a paid plan you pick the number yourself, anywhere from 100 to 10,000. Signed in to the free plan the number is fixed by the plan and the row shows it instead of a choice. Not signed in at all, you can also pick Keep everything and nothing is ever removed for age.
Whatever you pick, the count is of history items only. The row says so: saved items are never auto-deleted.
On the free plan
The free plan keeps the 500 most recent history items. The row reads "Your plan keeps the 500 most recent history items. Saved (Vault) items are never auto-deleted." As you copy new things the oldest ones drop out of view, on this computer and on every device you sync with.
Text items that drop out are not thrown away. They are held back, and they come straight back if you move to a paid plan, on the next sync after you do. An item with a picture or a file attached is removed properly when it drops out, because the bytes are the part that costs real space. If a screenshot matters to you, keep it before the window rolls past it.
Plans and limits has the rest of the numbers.
On a computer that is not signed in
A computer with no Relic account keeps whatever fits on its disk, so the row starts at Keep everything and a second control appears under it.
Remove history older than is an age limit rather than a count: Never, 30 days, 90 days or 1 year. It works alongside the count, so you can hold 1,000 items and still drop anything older than 90 days. Both leave kept items alone. Once you sign in to sync, this control goes away and your plan sets the window.
Clearing it all
Clear all history is the manual version of the same idea. The row shows how many history items you have and a Clear… button.
Relic asks first, and tells you exactly what is about to go:
- Kept items are not touched.
- On a computer signed in to sync, the deletion travels to your other devices as they sync.
- When it is done Relic says how many went, for example Cleared 1,240 items.
To empty history without losing anything you care about, keep the items you want first. To stop history filling up at all, turn capture off for a while instead. The rest of the pane is on Settings: Vault and storage, and Space and where files live covers the space these items take.