FAQ request: Where does Element store messages?

[civility-bot]

Is your suggestion related to a problem? Please describe.
It's hard to find any information about where messages are stores - for 1:1 conversations, and rooms. Googling for "riot message history" returns some game-related results and an unmaintained server plugin, and replacing "Riot" with "Element" returns nothing relevant ("elements" being a vague search term SEO-wise doesn't help).

Describe the solution you'd like
Adding a Q&A to https://element.io/help would be great, e.g. in the Rooms section:

• Where does Element store messages?
• What is the storage quota?
• What is the message retention policy?

Additional context
element-hq/element-meta#1268, #2630.

[t3chguy]

Element is just a client, its like asking where does Google Chrome store websites, it doesn't.

https://matrix.org/docs/projects/other/matrix-recorder isn't a server plugin, its an alternate Matrix client intended for one purpose, archiving/exporting.

https://matrix.org/faq/#what-is-a-homeserver%3F

This is an issue tracker, not a support forum

What is the storage quota?
What is the message retention policy?

These both depend on the server on which you registered your user, not Element which can be used with any Matrix server

[vb0]

This sounds like a very much legitimate question and I couldn't find any answer too. Also Chrome DOES "store websites" (like most web browsers for the last 20 years or so, most with relatively complicated mechanisms of aging, policies about the space used and so on) and even more so now there is "persistent storage" (used by Element Web client too).

[t3chguy]

"store websites"

If you count caching as storing then Element too "stores" (caches) things in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API plus your browser cache will be doing its own thing of its own volition.