HALLOFORM
/External storage

External storage

Send completed submissions straight to your own destinations and keep nothing on Halloform's servers.

What it does#

"Only use external storage" makes a form a pass-through: a completed response is handed to the destinations you've connected (Google Sheets, Notion, a webhook, Slack, and so on) and is then deleted from Halloform's database. Nothing respondent-identifying is retained on our servers — useful when a data-residency or retention policy means submissions must live only in your own systems.

Connect a destination first
With this on, your database is no longer the safety net. If a form has no enabled integration when a response comes in, that response has nowhere to land and is lost. Always connect (and test) at least one destination before turning external storage on.

How it works#

When a respondent completes the form, Halloform writes the submission just long enough to fan it out to every connected destination, then purges the row and its answers once delivery has been attempted. Partial / in-progress saves are never written at all — only a completed submission has somewhere to go.

  • Only completed submissions are dispatched — abandoned or partially-filled responses are dropped.
  • Delivery runs against every enabled integration on the form, exactly as it does for a normal form.
  • After delivery the submission is removed, so it won't appear in Results, analytics, CSV export, or the live results stream.
  • Email notifications (to you and to the respondent) still send if you've configured them.

Turn it on#

  1. Connect at least one destination on the form's Integrations tab and confirm it's enabled.
  2. Open Settings → Behavior.
  3. Switch on "Only use external storage".
  4. Save — this re-enables Publish, so publish the form to push the change live.
The toggle is locked on Free and Pro. On those plans it shows a Business badge; upgrade to unlock it. Switching it back off is always allowed, even after a downgrade.

Where data goes#

Every Halloform integration counts as an external destination:

  • Google Sheets and Notion (one row / page per submission).
  • Webhooks (raw JSON to your endpoint) and Zapier / Make / n8n.
  • Notify channels: Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat.
  • CRM & marketing: Airtable, Mailchimp, Brevo, HubSpot, ConvertKit, Trello, Pipedrive, Intercom, Salesforce.
  • Google Calendar (an event per submission).
You can connect several at once — a response fans out to all of them. See the Integrations Overview for setup steps per connector.

What you give up#

Because nothing is kept, the features that read from stored submissions don't apply to an external-storage form:

  • The Results table, analytics, completion-rate trend, and CSV export will be empty — read your data in the destination instead.
  • Partial submissions and "resume later" are off, and the drop-off funnel has no data.
  • Prevent-duplicate-submissions relies on stored responses, so it can't take effect here.
This is a deliberate trade: zero retention means zero on-platform history. If you need both Halloform's results tools and external delivery, leave this off — a normal form already streams to your integrations while keeping a copy.

Plans#

Only-use-external-storage is a Business-plan feature. The plan check is enforced server-side, so it can't be enabled from the API on a Free or Pro org either.