Can I recover deleted traces in LangSmith?

Short answer

No. Once a trace is deleted in LangSmith, it cannot be recovered. There is no recycle bin or undo mechanism, and our support team cannot restore deleted traces. Deletion is permanent.

This applies to both manual deletions (e.g., deleting a project or individual traces) and automatic deletions that occur when a trace's retention period expires.

How trace retention works

LangSmith has two retention tiers for traces:

After the retention period ends, traces are no longer accessible in the UI or API. User data (inputs, outputs) is deleted from internal systems within a day. Some metadata is retained indefinitely for billing and analytics purposes only.

For more detail, see Data storage and retention and Usage and billing: Data retention.

How to protect important traces going forward

1. Save traces to a dataset (recommended)

Datasets have indefinite retention and are not subject to the 14 or 400 day limits. If you have traces that are critical for evaluation, debugging, or compliance, add them to a dataset. This preserves the inputs and outputs even after the original trace is deleted.

• From the UI: select a trace, then click Add to → Dataset in the top right.

• Programmatically: use the SDK to create examples from filtered runs.

• Automatically: use an automation rule to route matching traces into a dataset.

2. Use automation rules to extend retention automatically

Instead of manually upgrading traces, set up automation rules that extend retention for traces matching specific criteria. For example:

• All traces that contain errors

• 10% of all traces (for long-term trend analysis)

• Traces with specific metadata tags

To configure: go to Projects → Your project → + New → New Automation, then select Extend data retention as the action.

See Set up automation rules for full details.

3. Change your project's default retention tier

If most traces in a project are important, change the project-level default from Base to Extended so all incoming traces are retained for 400 days.

To configure: go to Projects → Your project → Retention and select the desired default. This only applies to future traces.

4. Export traces externally (Plus and Enterprise only)

If you need traces stored outside LangSmith (e.g., in BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift), use bulk data export. This is available on Plus and Enterprise plans.

You can also query and export trace data programmatically using the SDK at any time before the retention period ends. See Query traces (SDK).