Cancelled your TMS or WMS subscription? How to recover historical data

Is the data really gone after cancellation?#

TMS and WMS data is often not gone the moment a subscription ends; many vendors keep account data for a period before deletion, and backups can persist longer. The agreement, the vendor's retention policy and its account closure documentation decide how long, and those periods vary widely between vendors.

The risk is that nobody checks. Cancellation is usually handled by finance or procurement, while the people who rely on shipment, order and inventory history sit in operations. By the time someone asks for last year's exception records or a client's cycle-count history, the window may be closing.

Step 1: find the deletion window#

The deletion window is the period after termination during which the vendor still holds your data and may let you retrieve it. The window can run from the notice date, the end of the paid term or the deactivation date, so read the wording carefully.

Write down the exact date, the clause or policy it comes from, and who at the vendor confirmed it. If the documents disagree, assume the earliest date applies until the vendor confirms otherwise in writing.

• 1Termination and effect-of-termination clauses in the master agreement.
• 2Data return, export or transition assistance provisions in the order form.
• 3Deletion and return sections of any data processing addendum.
• 4The vendor's published retention or account closure policy.
• 5The cancellation confirmation email, which sometimes states a deletion date.

Step 2: request the export in writing#

A written export request is the fastest route to recovery while the window is open. Send it to your account manager and the contract notice address, name the data and format you need, and ask the vendor to confirm that deletion is paused until the export is delivered.

Keep the request short and specific. For example: please provide a complete export of all data in our account, including closed records, attachments, audit logs and master data, in a documented machine-readable format with field definitions; confirm the date our data is scheduled for deletion; and confirm that deletion is paused until we have received and checked the export.

Expect the vendor to point to its terms. Some charge for bulk extracts or reactivation, and some offer a short read-only reinstatement. A brief reactivation of a paid plan can cost less than rebuilding history from fragments, so compare the two honestly.

Step 3: search your own systems for copies#

Your own systems often hold more TMS and WMS history than expected, because operational data rarely lives in one place. Integrations, reporting tools and trading partners kept copies as part of daily work, and some of those copies are more complete than anyone remembers.

Pull each source into one folder structure by record family and period, and keep originals untouched. Reconstructed history is only credible if someone can trace every file back to where it came from.

Step 4: document what was recovered#

A recovery log documents what came back, from which source, for which periods and with which known gaps. Without one, the next person to use the data will assume it is complete, and decisions about billing disputes, audits or a later licensing review will rest on that assumption.

If an open claim, audit or dispute touches a missing period, tell counsel. A documented gap is manageable; an undocumented one can look like deletion after a duty to preserve arose.

• 1Record family and the system it originally came from.
• 2Source of the recovered copy and the date it was retrieved.
• 3Date range covered and known gaps.
• 4Format, file location and file or row counts.
• 5Who retrieved it and who checked it against another source.

Which records should you recover first?#

Recover first the records someone is already asking for, then the records that explain how the operation actually ran. An open billing dispute, a carrier claim or a client audit sets the first priority, because those requests come with deadlines and possible preservation duties.

Next come linked event histories: exceptions with their resolution notes, receipts with their discrepancies, shipments with their status changes. These are the hardest to rebuild from other systems and the most useful for later analysis. Master data such as items, locations and customers comes with them, since transaction history cannot be read without it. Summary reports and dashboards come last; they are easy to regenerate from detailed records and nearly worthless without them.

Illustrative: a contract warehouse rebuilds its WMS history#

Illustrative: a fictional contract warehouse moved to a new WMS and cancelled the old subscription. The migration carried open orders and current inventory only. Later, a client disputes storage billing and asks for historical cycle counts and adjustments that existed only in the old system.

The COO finds the deletion window still open and secures a short read-only reactivation, exporting receipts, picks, cycle counts and adjustments with their reason codes. Warehouse shipping orders and advices in the VAN archive fill one gap; scheduled BI extracts cover another. Every source goes into a recovery log.

The billing dispute is settled from the recovered counts. When the company later considers whether its inventory discrepancy records could be licensed, the recovery log answers the first provenance questions before any file is shared.

How SourceX treats recovered history#

SourceX treats recovered history like any other archive, with one added question: can its provenance be shown. In the Supply step of the SourceX five-step transaction (Supply, Rights, Preparation, Approval, Delivery), the recovery log becomes part of the record of where each file came from.

For anything that proceeds, the SourceX Evidence Packet records provenance, licensing rights, permitted use, the privacy record and release authorization. The initial fit check works from descriptions rather than files, so a company can learn whether recovered history is worth preparing before sharing anything.