Forum Discussion
Configuring Copilot chat retention policies
We're looking at implementing a 30-day retain-and-delete policy for Microsoft Copilot chats and have a couple of questions.
Firstly, is the retention period applied to the chat as a whole or to the individual prompts and responses within that chat?
For example, if a user starts a chat on Day 1 and then goes back into the same chat on Day 20 to ask another question, does that new activity effectively keep the whole chat for another 30 days? Or are the original prompts and responses still deleted 30 days after they were created, regardless of later activity in the same conversation?
Secondly, what happens if a Copilot chat is moved into a Copilot Notebook? Does the same retention policy still apply to the chat content, or does moving it to a notebook change how long it is retained?
More generally, if users need to keep Copilot content for longer than 30 days, what is the recommended approach? For example, would moving the chat to a Notebook preserve it beyond the retention period, or would users need to save the content elsewhere, such as a Word document, SharePoint site or another M365 location?
Any guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks
2 Replies
Your 30-day retain-and-delete policy operates on individual Copilot interaction messages, rather than restarting one timer for the entire conversation. In your example, the Day 1 messages keep their original retention age when you add messages on Day 20; the later messages have their own age. Background processing and holds mean expiry is not a promise of immediate deletion from either the interface or compliance storage.
Adding a conversation to a Copilot Notebook should not be treated as extending chat retention. Microsoft distinguishes chat conversations from the notebook’s SharePoint Embedded content; notebooks are not an exemption from the interaction policy.
For material that your organization needs longer, agree an approved recordkeeping approach with the compliance administrator. Save the required content to Word in an appropriately governed SharePoint library and confirm that library’s applicable retention policies or labels. Validate the result with eDiscovery, rather than relying on continued visibility in Copilot.
Thank you very much. Your response is what I presumed to be the case, that it operations on individual interactions and not the entire conversation thread and that we would need to move it to Word or OneNote, rather than Copilot Notebook.
