What is Archiving?

Yousign offers a legal electronic archiving service through its partner Arkhineo, a certified third-party archiver.
With this service, you can archive your files in a secure digital safe for 10 years (from the date of archiving).

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The Archiving feature is an add-on to your Yousign subscription. Make sure it is activated for your account.

This feature can be used in two different ways:

you can directly archive a file from the API,
or you can set an option on a Signature Request to automatically archive the documents once the Signature Request is completed

Archive a file

You can archive a file directly in a secure digital safe with the archives endpoint:

POST /archives

curl --location --request POST '{baseUrl}/archives' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer {apiKey}' \
--header 'Accept: application/json' \
--header 'Content-Type: multipart/form-data' \
--form 'file=@"/path/to/the/document/sample_document_archive.pdf"'

{
    "id": "f6624a42-cbcf-4d68-b315-6bf883190de8",
    "sha256": "6ecf29381314217530c02c64a97050a0a6a0944bb974b6b417588277e289aef0",
    "filename": "sample_document_archive.pdf",
    "created_at": "2024-07-26T08:10:17+00:00",
    "expired_at": "2025-01-01T08:10:17+00:00",
    "content_type": "application/pdf",
    "size": 123456,
    "tags": [
        "ref-order-HEY1337",
        "ref-customer-YS42"
    ],
    "archive_y_identifier": "e32aff82-eae7-40d2-bb19-4d425c3b6780",
    "workspace_id": "1f3a8e7a-3948-4680-b306-75cd1b49e761"
}

Query Param	Type	Description
file	file	The file you want to archive. Limit: 50 Mo
expired_at	date	Even if your archive is stored for 10 years, it’s possible to define an end of life date before these 10 years. The price remains unchanged but this feature allows you to better control the retention time of your data.
tags	array of strings	The tags are used to easily locate your archive with your internal keywords (reference, purchase order, …).
archive_y	boolean	This feature is very specific and allows you to archive a document in different secure spaces with our third-party archiving partner. For this service, it's necessary to contact our Sales team beforehand.
workspace_id	string	If you have several Workspaces within your organization, you can attach the id of one of those Workspaces to closely monitor your archives consumption.

Please note that you’ll need theid value found in the response to be able to download an archived file.

Archive all documents of a Signature Request

You can activate the Archiving option when initiating a new Signature Request (see API reference). If activated, all the documents (signed documents, attachments) will be automatically archived in a secure digital safe once the Signature Request is completed.

To activate the option, you must add the archiving parameter to the payload when you initiate the Signature Request. This parameter can take 3 values:

Value	Description
null	[default value] The documents of the Signature Request won’t be archived.
archive	The documents of the Signature Request will be archived in a secure digital safe.
archiveY	This feature is very specific and allows you to archive a document in two different secure spaces. For this service, it's necessary to contact our Sales team beforehand.

POST /signature_requests

{
     "name": "signature request name",
     "delivery_mode": "none",
     "signers_allowed_to_decline": false,
     "archiving": "archive"
}

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The archiving parameter is flagged as deprecated in the API reference as this service is only available for specific customers.

Track archives consumption

You can track the consumption on your account, and in particular the volume of archived files (in Mo), from your consumption dashboard.

This consumption overview is available for sandbox and production environments.

Download an archived file

Your archived files are only accessible through the Yousign API. There is no graphical user interface available to consult them.

However, you can retrieve an archived file through the API, using the id received in the response payload when archiving the file. The endpoint details can be found here.

Use Archiving in Sandbox

You can test the Archiving feature in Sandbox. However, the files won’t be actually stored in the digital safe of our third-party provider.