Most articles answering this question are repeating numbers that stopped being true in 2022. This one takes every figure from Twitch's own help documentation, links the source, and says plainly which parts Twitch has never documented.
Checked against Twitch's help pages in August 2026.
Past broadcasts (VODs)
From On-Demand Content on Twitch:
"Twitch Partners, Prime and Twitch Turbo users will have past broadcasts saved for 60 days before being deleted. Twitch Affiliates have their past broadcasts saved for 14 days. All other broadcasters will have their past broadcasts saved for 7 days before they are deleted."
So:
- Regular accounts, no affiliate status: 7 days.
- Affiliates: 14 days.
- Partners, Prime and Turbo: 60 days.
Two things about this list are worth pinning down, because the internet gets both wrong.
Turbo and Prime get 60 days, not 14. They sit with Partners. Plenty of guides still say Turbo gets 14, which comes from the tiering Twitch used before September 2022. If you read that anywhere, the page is stale.
There is a 7 day tier at all. Guides that only mention "14 or 60" quietly assume everyone is at least an Affiliate. If you are a smaller streamer, a week is all you get.
One more detail that costs people their archives: storage is off by default. Twitch's own wording is "Past broadcast storage is not enabled by default." Nobody is keeping your VODs until you switch it on.
Twitch also hedges its own rule. The second passage on that page begins "Most Twitch Partners, Prime and Twitch Turbo users will have their past broadcasts saved for 60 days," and never explains who the exceptions are. The storage table marks the 7 day figure with an asterisk that has no matching footnote anywhere in the article. I am not reading anything sinister into it, but if you are planning around the exact boundary, plan for less.
Vertical and 2K renditions expire sooner
If you stream in Dual Format or at 2K, the extra rendition has a shorter life than the VOD it belongs to:
"The vertical version of your VOD will expire 7 days after your stream, after which the horizontal version will be available for the remainder of your existing retention period."
The same 7 day rule applies to the 2K rendition, per Stream Quality. The VOD survives; the fancy version of it does not.
Chat replay: Twitch has never published a policy
Here is the finding that surprised me. Searching the entire Twitch help centre, the phrase "chat replay" appears in none of its articles. There is no stated retention period, no statement about whether replay survives its VOD, and nothing about how it behaves on highlights or exports.
What can be said honestly:
- Chat replay is served as part of a past broadcast, not as a separate object you can link to on its own.
- In practice, when the broadcast is deleted, the replay goes with it. Everyone who has looked for an expired VOD's chat has found this.
- Twitch's API offers no supported way to read a past broadcast's chat. The old v5 comments endpoint was removed and the current Helix API has no replacement.
Anyone telling you "chat replay is kept for X days" is guessing. It is a reasonable guess, and it is still a guess. The honest version is that chat replay lasts as long as the VOD does, and Twitch has never promised anything about it in writing.
This gap is the entire reason this site exists, so treat that paragraph as interested testimony and check the help centre yourself.
Clips
Clips are the durable format, with a caveat about what "durable" means.
The two dedicated clip help articles say nothing at all about expiry. The only official "will not expire" language sits inside feature articles, for example Dual Format: "Clips from Dual Format streams will be available in both vertical and horizontal formats and will not expire." The VOD storage table lists clips as N/A for every tier, meaning they consume no storage quota.
So the accurate statement is that clips have no published expiry and are not governed by the VOD storage window. What Twitch does not state anywhere is whether a clip survives the deletion of the VOD it was cut from. Widely assumed, never documented.
Clips do disappear in three ways that are documented:
- The streamer deletes them, including a bulk delete of every clip on their channel. "Deleting clips is permanent, and cannot be undone."
- Copyright enforcement. When audio is flagged, "that portion of your VOD is muted and associated clips are deleted."
- If a streamer features your clip, you lose the ability to delete it yourself.
Highlights and uploads
From the same VOD article: highlights and uploads are stored indefinitely, with a combined 100 hour storage limit per channel, including unpublished ones. Past broadcasts do not count toward that cap. Unpublishing does not free space; only deleting does. Uploading video at all is restricted to Affiliates and Partners.
The 100 hour cap arrived in 2025. Twitch's current article documents the cap but not the rollout dates, which were only reported in the press at the time, so treat the timeline as journalism rather than policy.
Turning a good moment into a highlight before the VOD expires is the one reliable way to keep video on Twitch permanently. It does nothing for the chat.
Chat logs for moderators
Not retention of a VOD, but it belongs on this page because it is the most misunderstood number here.
Moderators and the broadcaster can open a viewer card and read a user's history in that channel. Twitch states in several articles, including Mod View, that "chat message logs in viewer cards display messages from the past 3.5 years", with moderator actions and comments retained indefinitely.
Three and a half years of chat history, per user, per channel, exists inside Twitch. It is
visible to moderators and the broadcaster only, and a streamer can switch even that off from the
dashboard. A viewer has no route to it, for anyone, including themselves. For your own messages
there is a separate and slower path: the
data request that produces
chat_messages.csv within 14 days.
Summary table
| Content | How long Twitch keeps it |
|---|---|
| Past broadcast, regular account | 7 days |
| Past broadcast, Affiliate | 14 days |
| Past broadcast, Partner / Prime / Turbo | 60 days |
| Vertical or 2K rendition of a VOD | 7 days, then the standard version for the rest of the window |
| Chat replay | Not documented by Twitch; in practice it goes when the VOD goes |
| Clips | No published expiry, no storage quota |
| Highlights and uploads | Indefinitely, capped at 100 hours combined per channel |
| Viewer card chat logs (mods and broadcaster only) | 3.5 years |
| Your own messages by data request | Back to account creation, delivered within 14 days |
What this means if you care about chat
Video has several escape hatches. Highlight it, clip it, download it, and it lasts.
Chat has none. It is the only part of a stream with no permanent format, no export, no documented retention and no API. The conversation that made the moment worth clipping is the piece Twitch is least committed to keeping.
That is the gap we record into. We join chat as it happens, write the public messages down, and keep them after the 7, 14 or 60 days have run out, so the chat outlives the video instead of dying with it.
Search the archive for a stream you remember, or browse the channels we record.