Every pastebin has to answer the same question: how long should something you pasted stick around? "Forever" is the easy answer, and it is the wrong one for a tool where people share passwords they are about to rotate, half-written drafts and logs with internal hostnames in them.
The options, and why 1 month is the default
When you save a note, you now choose one of five lifetimes:
- 1 hour, 24 hours or 7 days for things that are only meant to make one trip.
- 1 month, the default.
- Keep, for notes you want to come back to.
Separately, you can tick delete after first read, and the note is destroyed the moment your recipient opens it, whatever the timer says.
The default matters more than the menu, because most people never change it. ShareNotes is built for moving text from one place to another: a link to a phone, a snippet to a colleague, the notes for today's class. A month covers the slow version of that, someone opening the link a week later, without leaving the note lying around for years after anyone needed it.
What "Keep" actually means
Keep does not mean forever. It means for as long as it is being used. A Keep note has no timer, but once nobody has opened it for 6 months it is deleted. Every visit resets the clock:
- opening it in a browser,
- reading it through the API, including its plain-text
/rawaddress, - an AI assistant reading it through our MCP server.
A note you check every week, a class page you reuse each term, a cheat sheet you open now and then: all of those stay. A note pasted once and forgotten goes.
Notes created through the API follow the same rule. Send expiresIn as
1h, 24h, 7d or 30d for a timer; leave
it out and the note behaves like Keep.
The bug in our own promise
Before this change, our pages said a note was "removed 7 days after it was last opened". The code to do that existed. The job that runs it was switched off in production, so no note without a timer was ever deleted.
Timers did work for readers: a note past its time refused to open. But the expired note was still sitting in our database. When we switched the cleanup job on, its first run deleted 1,619 notes that had already expired, 112 view-once notes that had already been read, and 19 that nobody had opened in 6 months.
The expired and already-read notes could not be opened anyway. The 19 inactive ones could have been, but nobody had tried for at least 6 months, and our pages had promised they would be gone long before. A privacy promise that the server does not keep is not a promise, and we had been making it on 19 pages. Those pages now describe the rule the server actually enforces, and the cleanup job runs every day.
Two details about how deletion works, because "deleted" should mean something specific:
- Deletion removes the row from the database. It is not a hidden flag.
- A view-once note's text is wiped the moment it is read. The empty row stays for 24 hours, so a second visitor sees "this note has already been opened" rather than a confusing "not found". Then the row goes too.
One honest caveat: we take occasional database backups, and a deleted note can survive in one of those for a while. Our privacy policy says so.
Why abandoned notes are a liability
Deleting things people did not ask us to delete is a real cost, so here is the other side of it.
- Privacy. People paste things they would not want found years later. The longer a note exists, the longer its link can be forwarded, leaked or stumbled on. A note nobody is using protects nobody by staying online.
- Abuse. Long-lived pages that nobody watches are what spammers and phishers look for. Notes that expire are a worse place to host a scam.
- Honesty. We would rather tell you exactly when a note goes than promise "forever" from a free service that can't guarantee it.
Storage is the least of it. Text is small.
How to keep a note alive, or keep your own copy
- Choose Keep when you save, then open the note at least once every 6 months.
- Download it. The download button saves the note as a
.txtor.mdfile. - Don't treat ShareNotes as a backup. Our terms say this plainly: a note can also be lost to an error or an outage. If it matters, keep a copy somewhere you control.