Retention policies in SharePoint
Do you have data that needs to be kept for a certain period of time? Or do you want to ensure that data isn’t accidentally deleted? As you start moving your documents into SharePoint, you can take the guess work out of data retention with Microsoft’s in-built data retention policies.
All files in SharePoint (and Teams) or OneDrive can be retained for a set period of time by applying a simple retention policy.
1. Start by navigating to the Compliance Admin Center
2. Then select Policies
3. And Under Data select “Retention”
4. Then click “New Retention Policy”
5. Give your policy a name and description
6. You can then select whether your policy will be “Static” or “Adaptive”
a) An adaptive policy will automatically update where it's applied based on attributes or properties you can define.
b) A static policy is applied to content in a fixed set of locations and must be manually updated if those locations change.
7. On the next screen you can then choose where to apply the policy. You can apply it to Exchange (Email), SharePoint Sites (this includes Teams sites), OneDrive Accounts and many more (Such as group mailboxes, Teams chats and messages, Yammer messages etc.)
8. Once you’ve chosen where you want to apply the policy to, you can set the period of time items will be retained for.
a) You also have the option to select what happens at the end of the retention period e.g., delete items automatically, or do nothing.
9. On the last screen, you’ll need to review all your settings to make sure they’re correct before submitting your retention policy.
10. It can take up to a week for a policy to take effect, but in most cases it only takes minutes for it to take effect. You can check the status of its deployment at any time by clicking on the policy and viewing “Status”.
What happens after you publish a retention policy?
Depending on what content you have applied the policy to, you will no longer be able to delete content. If you try to delete, you’ll get an error message e.g., if you try to delete a SharePoint site you will see “This site has a compliance policy set to block deletion”.
Your SharePoint site will also have a new document library in it called a “Preservation Hold” library, which will retain content modified or deleted during the retention policy. Items will still go to the recycle bin in your site, but it will also be copied to the Preservation Hold Library. In the Preservation Hold library, files will be date and time stamped to identify when the item was deleted.
Items in the Preservation Hold Library will not be able to be deleted.
You will also not be able to delete a folder on a site anymore without first deleting its contents. You will now get the following message when you try to delete a folder (that is not empty) - “You have to delete all the items in this folder before you can delete the folder”.
