The current default time for disappearing messages is 30 seconds. Although this can be manually changed within each chat or in the general privacy settings, after sending or receiving a new message the Observer Vault sets it back to 30 seconds again.
Having a fixed disappearing messages time can be too restrictive. For slow internet connections, I was able to replicate cases in which the Observer Vault user receives a message with an attachment but if the download doesn't finish within the 30 seconds time frame, the content won't get saved and the file is lost.