Forum Discussion
SharePoint Online: "List cannot be deleted while on hold or retention policy."
I am trying to help a client clean up some very old lists and sites. However, whenever I try to delete anything, I get the message above. I've checked for an eDiscovery site, for classification labels/policies, DLP policies, and am finding nothing. Any ideas?
We had the same issue and could not find any hold - retention policies in any place. We had to escalate to Microsoft support and they removed the hold on the back-end.
I hope this helps.
Norm
15 Replies
Had all of the issues the users in this thread were experiencing, even after deleting all list items and checking hold and retention policies. The problem was that I had the list still open on Teams, once I closed it I was able to delete with no issues.
TLDR: Make sure the list isn't open when you want to delete. Sharing if that helps anyone!
Hi Brittinator - I have never heard of that being an issue before. Thank you for sharing!
Kelly_Edinger Thanks for posting this. I just ran into this issue when trying to delete a library. Thanks to those who suggested deleting the contents then, in this case, the library.
What is the error?
Check the site and list for any hold or retention policies.
- Site Settings > Site Collection Administration > Content Type Policy Templates.
- List Settings > Information management policy settings.
