New Panopto Content Retention Policy

At the end of the Fall 2022 academic semester, the UArizona Academic Technology Governance group applied a new content retention (archival) policy to the university’s Panopto account. This content retention policy will archive videos that haven’t been viewed for a certain period of time. Archived videos are not available for immediate viewing, but creators or viewers of the videos can still restore them from the archive for viewing access. This is not a deletion policy. No videos are being deleted with this policy. If videos meet the criteria for archival, they go into an archived state and 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 archived state. If a video has never been viewed, then the policy will look at the video’s creation date.

What Panopto content is affected by this policy?

This content retention policy has been applied to all content that resides inside a D2L 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 meetings 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 click 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 and Panopto’s How to Restore Archived Content support page goes into great detail about those methods.

Important Points of Note

1. 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.
    
2. Archived videos can remain in the Archive indefinitely but must be restored before they can be viewed.
   1. Restoration of an archived video can take up to 48 hours
   2. All users can restore a video for viewing, as long as they have appropriate permissions to the video.
       
3. Archived videos will no longer appear when browsing the library, but will still appear in search results.
   1. Archived videos will still be associated with a folder, but will not display within that folder list view.
   2. If a video is restored, it will appear in its associated folder once it is ready to view.
   3. 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.