We ask under what conditions a finite brickwork circuit of random gates retains local information about the initial state. To answer this question we measure the averaged Frobenius distance between the reduced states obtained by evolving two arbitrary initial states and tracing out a portion of the system. By characterising this distance exactly at all times we find that the information is retained if the environment — the subsystem traced out — is smaller than half of the system and washed away otherwise. We also find that, while the dynamics of the Frobenius distance depends on the specific initial states chosen, this dependence becomes increasingly weak for large scales and eventually the Frobenius distance attains a universal form as a function of time. Finally, we show that by introducing weak enough boundary dissipation, one can observe a phase transition between a memory preserving phase and one where the information is completely lost. Our statements can be rephrased in terms of a decoding problem, where one tries to retrieve initial state information, encoded by the brickwork circuit, by measuring a local subsystem.