Most document tools keep files around longer than necessary. Sometimes they end up in a temp bucket, a cache, or an old debug log. Often, nobody explicitly decided to keep them—they just never got deleted.
Stateless conversion starts with a clear retention rule: when a file arrives, how long it can be processed, and when it is deleted. Write that down. Deletion shouldn't be treated as an invisible background task.
There is also a practical reason to keep file retention to a minimum. The fewer files a system keeps, the less data it has to protect, move, or account for later. When a customer asks what happens to their documents, the answer is much simpler when the system doesn't keep them around in the first place.
A stateless design has trade-offs. If a browser closes halfway through a job, there may be nothing left to resume. That's not necessarily a flaw—it is simply a consequence of choosing not to retain user files. It's better to be clear about that limitation than to imply that a recovery feature exists when it doesn't.
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