Forum Discussion
File retention policy for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint
Based on the settings you have selected, this policy will immutably preserve any document that has been modified in the past 2 years. During this 2 years period, if someone tries to delete the document, a copy of it will be saved in the preservation library, which only admins can access. After 2 years past, documents that have been deleted (and moved to the Preservation library) will no longer be protected and will automatically be purged. Documents that have not been marked for deletion will remain intact in their original location. It's all explained in the documentation.
"Retention" has a different meaning when it comes to compliance. If you want to make sure that files are not permanently deleted and can be recovered after 2 years or more, you need to set up retention policies as detailed here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/overview-of-retention-policies-5e377752-700d-4870-9b6d-12bfc12d2423#how
Without retention policies (or any other type of hold), at best you can hope for 3 months.
I want to make sure the files are not permanently deleted and it can be recovered within two years of time. I was reading the TechNet docs.
In security and compliance -> data governance -> retention ->create new policy -> settings.
I was little lost here.
If I enable this policy, will work in recovering the deleted data within two years of time.
If possible, can some explain what exactly this setting imply in retention?
Thanks
Based on the settings you have selected, this policy will immutably preserve any document that has been modified in the past 2 years. During this 2 years period, if someone tries to delete the document, a copy of it will be saved in the preservation library, which only admins can access. After 2 years past, documents that have been deleted (and moved to the Preservation library) will no longer be protected and will automatically be purged. Documents that have not been marked for deletion will remain intact in their original location. It's all explained in the documentation.
Be careful when turning on preservation policies as it will or at least it used to cause some ill effects with OneDrive clients and the user experience. Such as you could not delete folders and I want to say you couldn't move folders either when this was turned on. I haven't tried recently if those issues have been fixed but it was a deal breaker for us from a user perspective and decided that just turning it on so it didn't remove the users OneDrives after deletion was enough.