Retention Policy and deletion

[JakobRohde]

We currently have a one-year retention policy covering Exchange, SharePoint etc. The policy is set to "Do nothing" for "At the end of the retention period". My question is: When the one-year retention period has expired, what will be deleted - everything that is more than one year old (even content that has not been deleted by the owner) - or only the contents that have been deleted by the user one year ago?

[#2]

When creating a retention policy, there's an option called "Start the retention time based on". This is when the retention time starts, so if it's set to "creation" and the file was created more than 1 year ago, it would be deleted. If it's set to modification, the file was modified less than a year ago, it would remain in place. The "Do nothing" option actually only removes content from the preservation hold location.

[#3]

Thanks pvanberlo. What I am asking is, if I set the policy to "delete" when the retention period has expired, is it only the content that were deleted by the user one year ago that will now be permanently deleted, or is it ALL content that was last edited one year ago, that will be deleted permanently?

[#4]

When you enable a policy and set it to delete, it would evaluate based on the setting mentioned above if any action needs to be taken on content. This would imply that if I would set the policy to look at last modified, it was modified more than a year ago, all content that was modified more than a year ago is deleted. The time period specified for a retention policy is calculated from the time when the item was created or modified, and not the time since the policy was assigned.

[#5]

Thanks again. But my question has still not been answered: Will a retention policy that is set to delete content after the retention period has expired mean, that ALL content that has been created or edited (depending on the policy settings) be deleted? Or is it only the content that has previously been deleted by the owner of the content, that will be deleted?

[#6 · Accepted solution]

It's all content under the scope of the policy. As mentioned above it depends on what you configure, but generally speaking a "1 year delete" policy will remove items one year after they have been created. Regardless of whether the user deleted them first or not, this plays no role here.

[#7]

I believe to clarify in what you are saying. In a 1-year policy with retention and deletion after 1 year. It does not delete all of 2021 when we start 2022. I will delete Jan 1 of 2021 when we reach Jan 1 of 2022 will continue that track of the one-year date. Deleting items in the 365 days on 1-year retention deletion policy or whatever policy time period you have setup.

Correct?