Hibernation is a temporary service suspension we offer as a cost-reduction measure for our users who only require Handshake access for short periods of the year and would rather not pay subscription fees for the other times of the year when they are not using the Service.
Hibernation will occur automatically when there are no longer any active subscriptions on your account. Typically, the main methods by which your account will enter this state are:
You use the subscription plan page to configure your current subscription to stop auto-renewing, and you allow it to expire.
Your payment method becomes invalid (e.g. credit card expires or has insufficient funds) and we are unable to process payment for your automatic renewal to keep your subscription active.
Hibernated accounts are identical to normal accounts, except that:
Users cannot connect to a Hibernated account from the Handshake iOS application, and will be logged out of their account on that iOS device if they try to connect.
Your account on the Handshake website becomes, for the most part, read-only. Some actions, including but not limited to making edits to customers or orders and uploading new data through the bulk importer are no longer allowed while the account is hibernated.
Handshake will store data for a hibernated account for a period of six months after the date at which the account became hibernated. If the account is still hibernated at the time that period expires, we reserve the right to erase all of your data from our servers, and it will no longer be accessible. We will send you a warning email in advance of erasing your data, however it is your responsibility to have kept your contact information up-to-date and we disclaim any responsibility for any costs or damages related to the erasure of your data, regardless of whether or not you receive and acknowledge this warning email.
To clarify: all that is required to prevent your account from being erased is that you activate a paid subscription of any type at least once every six months.
If you intend to allow your hibernated account to eventually be erased, you have the option of using the export tools provided by the system (in particular, via the bulk import/export page) to reclaim your data in platform-neutral formats such as CSV and ZIP files. We make no warranty that these exported files will be able to be used to import your data into any third party system.
We in no way warrant that all data necessary to reconstruct your account in its current state can be exported and later re-imported into Handshake. In particular, Handshake does not currently support any method of importing sales orders from outside data sources.