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Voice Data Residency & Retention

This page explains where your voice data physically lives and how long Orbit keeps it. It covers call recordings, voicemail, and the live media plane that carries a call in progress. If you operate under GDPR, HIPAA, or a contract that restricts where regulated audio may be stored, read this before you record your first call.
This page describes Orbit’s platform controls. It is not legal advice. Your residency and retention obligations depend on where your callers are located, your industry, and your contracts. Confirm the specifics with qualified counsel.

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Where your voice data lives

Orbit runs its voice media plane in two regions: Each region runs its own media servers, its own live call-state store, and its own recording storage. When a tenant is pinned to a region, the following voice data stays in that region:
  • Call recordings — the stored audio of a recorded call.
  • Voicemail — recorded messages left for your numbers.
  • Live media — the in-flight audio of a call in progress, including the media plane that powers Orbit’s AI voice agents.
Additional regions (APAC, Middle East, LATAM) are provisioned on request — contact support if you need one that is not listed above.
Region pinning applies to the voice media described above. It does not, on its own, relocate every record in your workspace. If you have a contractual data-residency requirement that spans channels, raise it with support so we can confirm coverage before you go live.

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Choose your region

Your region is set per workspace. New workspaces default to auto, which routes each call to the nearest region at connect time. Pin an explicit region when you have a residency requirement — for example, an EU workspace that must keep all recorded audio in the EU.

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From the dashboard

Go to Voice → Regions, pick a region from the list, and save. Only workspace owners and admins can change the region, and every change is recorded in your audit log.

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From the API

List the available regions:
Read your current preference and the region calls would use right now:
  • preferred — your saved setting: auto, eu, or us.
  • resolved — the region your calls land in right now. When preferred is an explicit region the two match; when it is auto, resolved is the region auto-selection currently maps you to.
Pin an explicit region (owner or admin API key required):
A value outside auto, eu, or us returns a 422.
Changing your region affects new calls. Recordings already written in one region are not moved when you switch — they play back from wherever they were stored. Switch before you start recording if you need every recording in one region.

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In-region guarantee

Orbit does not carry an EU workspace’s call through US infrastructure, or the reverse. Each region is self-contained: the media servers, the live call-state store, and recording storage for a region all live in that region. There is no automatic cross-region failover — a region is never silently substituted for the one you pinned. Playback is the one exception, and it is safe: a recording is stored with its region built into its address, so a recording written in the EU plays back correctly even when a teammate opens it from a US-based session. The audio itself is never copied out of its home region to serve playback.

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Bring your own recording storage

If you would rather keep recordings in storage you control, you can point call recordings at your own Google Cloud Storage bucket under Voice → Calls → Recording settings. Orbit writes each recording directly to your bucket instead of Orbit-managed storage. This is useful when your retention, encryption, or residency policy is enforced at the storage layer by your own team. When a bring-your-own destination is configured but temporarily unreachable, Orbit falls back to its own storage so the recording is never lost, and flags the call so you can reconcile it later.

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How long voice data is kept

Recordings and voicemail are retained for a configurable window, then deleted automatically. When the window elapses, the stored audio file is deleted and its playback link is removed from the associated call or voicemail record. Set your retention window per channel under Settings → Compliance → Retention. The window applies from the time each recording is created.

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Stricter retention under HIPAA

When HIPAA mode is active, retention is enforced rather than optional, and call recordings are in scope. The HIPAA default is 365 days (configurable between 30 and 3,650 days), after which covered audio is securely deleted. See HIPAA compliance for the full covered-data list and configuration. You can place an individual recording under legal hold to exempt it from age-based auto-deletion — for example, when it is material to active litigation or an eDiscovery request. A recording on legal hold survives its normal retention window until you release the hold.
Recording and voicemail playback links are short-lived: each link is valid for one hour, then stops working. This limits the blast radius if a link is copied into a browser cache, a shared bookmark, or a forwarded email. The dashboard fetches a fresh link automatically each time you open a recording, so day-to-day playback is unaffected — but do not treat a copied playback URL as a durable reference. Fetch a new one when you need it.

Call Recording Consent

Per-jurisdiction rules for lawfully recording calls, and how Orbit enforces consent announcements.

HIPAA

Covered-data scope, enforced retention, and the BAA workflow for healthcare workloads.

Data Subject Requests

Handle access and erasure requests that cover recorded voice data.

SOC 2 Controls

Backups, logging retention, and the broader control environment.