CarpChip

Data Retention Policy

How CarpChip stores, protects, and retains your lake data — and what lake owners need to do to keep their own copies safe.

This page is maintained by CarpChip to explain how fishery data is handled in the CarpChip Tracker app. It describes current platform capabilities and owner responsibilities.

Retention period

While your CarpChip subscription is active, your lake data — including tagged fish records, catch records, photos, lake settings, and account information — is retained continuously and remains accessible in the app.

If your subscription ends or your account is closed, CarpChip retains your data for 30 days from that point. After the 30-day window, data may be removed from active storage and is not guaranteed to be recoverable.

How we protect your data

We protect fishery data using several layers of security built into the CarpChip Tracker platform:

  • Row-level access controls: Each lake, fish record, catch record, and photo is tied to the lake owner's account. Users can only access data they own or have been authorised to view.
  • Private storage: Photos are stored in private cloud storage buckets and are only served through time-limited, signed links.
  • Encrypted infrastructure: The underlying database and storage services encrypt data at rest and in transit as part of the Lovable Cloud platform that powers CarpChip.
  • Automated platform backups: The Lovable Cloud platform maintains its own infrastructure backups. These are for platform recovery and are not a substitute for lake-owner exports.

Lake owner responsibility

While CarpChip protects data inside the app, it is the lake owner's responsibility to create and keep their own regular backups of lake records, tagged fish, catch history, and photos.

The 30-day retention policy means CarpChip does not keep indefinite copies of every version of your data. If you need a long-term archive for regulatory, insurance, tax, or operational reasons, you must download it from the app before the retention window expires.

How to download your data

Lake owners can export their data at any time from inside the CarpChip Tracker dashboard. The export is a spreadsheet of lakes, tagged fish, and catch records.

Fish photos and images are not included in the data download and are not retained as part of the exported backup. If you need copies of catch photos, you must save them from the app before deleting a catch, lake or account.

We recommend downloading your data at least once every 30 days, and always before making bulk changes, deleting a lake, or cancelling your subscription.

To export your data:

  1. Sign in to CarpChip Tracker.
  2. Go to your dashboard.
  3. Click Download my data.
  4. Save the CSV file to a secure location on your device or cloud storage.

Questions?

If you have questions about this policy or need help exporting your data, contact us at hi@carpchip.com.