How Long Does Smallpdf Store My PDF After Signing?

Security is a key concern when using electronic and digital signatures. An important and legitimate question you may ask yourself in this regard will most likely be: What happens to my PDF after signing? Does Smallpdf retain the file, and if so, for how long?

Is Smallpdf’s eSign Tool Safe To Use?

Absolutely. We’re serious about data protection and privacy and always do our utmost to ensure that everyone’s personal information is safe and secure. We’re GDPR compliant as well as ISO/IEC 27001 certified, and all our tools carry a host of other security features.

Safety Measures To Expect With Smallpdf’s Tools, Including eSign

Whether it’s to compress, convert, or digitally sign a document, all Smallpdf’s tools are compliant with the major information security standards. They’re all hosted on our site, that’s protected with Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), and all file transfers are secured with advanced Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption.

When it comes to Smallpdf eSign, which offers both electronic and digital signing, security gets another layer. Digital signing protects your file and signature with features like Long-Term Validation (LTV) timestamping and eIDAS compliance.

LTV timestamping, which is very difficult to forge, records the precise date and time a signature is placed on a document. This is created when Smallpdf processes the file, adding a secure and trustworthy layer of security to a digitally signed PDF.

Electronic Identification and Trust Services, or eIDAS, is an EU regulation. It includes a wide range of features, such as the ability to authenticate electronic documents and check the identity of a person or organization.

In short:

1. Our site is protected with HTTPS and uses TLS encryption for every file transfer.
2. We’re ISO/IEC 27001 certified and GDPR and eIDAS compliant.
3. Privacy is guaranteed for you and your signees.
4. You control who can access your documents.
5. We offer secure digital signing with eSign with LTV timestamping.

Data Storage With Smallpdf

We respect your privacy, and we’re here to help you get your work done better and faster. When you process a file using Smallpdf’s web tools, the first thing that happens is you’ll upload it to our servers. Even though your file will come into contact with our servers during processing, we don’t store it for more than two hours if you proceed without creating an account or signing in. This should be enough time for you to download your processed file.

The aforementioned applies as long as you use our platform without an account or logging in. However, if you sign into your Smallpdf account, whether it’s with a free or paid subscription, you can choose to have your files stored for as long as you like if you save them to your Smallpdf account storage. If you delete a file from your storage, it will be removed from our servers within two hours. If you have an account but upload a document without saving it to your Smallpdf account storage, your file will be deleted after two hours of processing.

As for eSign and sharing, we keep your files on our servers until you delete them. This way, others can access them until you don’t need them anymore.

In short:

1. Without an account or without logging in, documents are deleted after two hours of processing.
2. Files are permanently kept in your Smallpdf file storage while logged into a free or premium account and are deleted from our servers after you delete them.
3. Logged into a free or paid account, documents not uploaded to your Smallpdf file storage will be deleted from our servers after two hours of processing.
4. All documents processed with eSign or shared with our file-sharing feature are kept on our servers until you delete them.

How To Turn Off Smallpdf’s Document Storage Service

While Smallpdf’s storage is secure, users always have the option to disable this function. For anyone who doesn’t want to have their documents saved to their Smallpdf account storage automatically, there is an option to deactivate this via the Preferences tab on the Account page.

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