diff --git a/.github/workflows/ci.yml b/.github/workflows/ci.yml
index 1240fa919..4b32f7acc 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/ci.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/ci.yml
@@ -98,8 +98,16 @@ jobs:
             echo "Transfer budget report was not produced." >> "$GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY"
           fi
 
+      # Non-fatal on purpose. This is a few KB of JSON whose only consumer is
+      # thread-transfer-report.yml, which turns it into a PR comment. Account
+      # artifact storage is a shared, org-wide resource that something else can
+      # exhaust, and when it is exhausted every upload fails — so leaving this
+      # step fatal lets an unrelated storage condition fail a run whose tests
+      # passed, which is what happened to #9. Losing the transfer comment is the
+      # correct way to degrade; blocking code review is not.
       - name: Upload thread transfer result
         if: always()
+        continue-on-error: true
         uses: actions/upload-artifact@v7
         with:
           name: thread-transfer-results
diff --git a/.github/workflows/release.yml b/.github/workflows/release.yml
index a93b6bb73..dd820bc5d 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/release.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/release.yml
@@ -706,12 +706,21 @@ jobs:
           mkdir -p "$target_dir"
           cp "$source_path" "$target_dir/$binary_name"
 
+      # These are intra-run handoff to `publish_release`, which downloads
+      # `desktop-*` and attaches them to the GitHub Release — that Release is the
+      # durable copy, not the artifact. At the repository default of 90 days a
+      # daily nightly retains ~880 MB per run across the four platforms, which
+      # reached ~14 GB and exhausted the account's artifact storage quota; once
+      # that happens *every* upload in the org fails, reddening unrelated PRs.
+      # A week is long enough to re-run a failed publish job against the same
+      # build and short enough to cap steady state near 6 GB.
       - name: Upload build artifacts
         uses: actions/upload-artifact@v7
         with:
           name: desktop-${{ matrix.platform }}-${{ matrix.arch }}
           path: release-publish/*
           if-no-files-found: error
+          retention-days: 7
 
       - name: Upload resource monitor
         uses: actions/upload-artifact@v7
@@ -719,6 +728,7 @@ jobs:
           name: resource-monitor-${{ matrix.resource_key }}
           path: resource-monitor-publish/${{ matrix.resource_key }}/*
           if-no-files-found: error
+          retention-days: 7
 
   publish_cli:
     name: Publish CLI to npm