Deleting SharePoint Sites / Office 365 Groups that contain records

Copper Contributor

Hi,

 

I did a bit of an experiment, using the Office 365 Advanced Data Governance features, and think I've found a bit of a flaw in the system.

 

I create two labels - 1 called 'Finance' and 1 called 'Finance - Record'.  Both labels applied a 7 year retention period with the 'Finance - Record' label also declaring the items as a record.  I then created an Office 365 Group to which these labels were published.  I created and labelled some content within the SharePoint Site associated with the Group.  

 

I then tried to delete the content I had created and, as expected, I got a message telling me that I couldn't delete because of the retention period.  I then tried to delete the Document Library that contained this content.  Again, as expected, I received a message telling me this wasn't possible.  I then went to Outlook and attempted to delete the Group.  I was, of course, expecting to receive an error message preventing this but, to my surprise, the Group deleted quite successfully.

 

I have subsequently waited for 2 days and used eDiscovery to attempt to locate these records that I seem to have very easily deleted.  Nothing can be found.  I've even used PowerShell to 'hard delete' the Groups since, for 30 days, they're hidden and can be recovered (not sure, then, why eDiscovery couldn't find the content?) but this didn't seem to trigger the content moving to some kind of preservation location.

 

Most odd.  Could someone please explain how this is supposed to work?  I looked at:  https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/overview-of-retention-policies-5e377752-700d-4870-9b6d-12bf... Unfortunately, the information there is not accurate so it hasn't helped.

 

Thanks!

 

Ady

7 Replies

Have you checked whether the underlying site collection still exists? 

Hi Vasil,

 

Thanks for your reply.  I have indeed checked - because that's what I thought might have happened - but, no, the site collection was deleted.

 

Regards,

 

Ady

Which kinda explains why you are not seeing any results in eDiscovery... I guess time to open a support ticket to get a proper answer as to whether this is the expected behavior.

Thanks Vasil.  It doesn't really explain why eDiscovery doesn't show the items - because Microsoft state that it should be able to...because the items should not have been permanently deleted.  My understanding is that they would be transferred to some kind of behind-the-scenes storage area for records.

 

I shall raise a ticket and expect the usual painful process of having someone understanding this issue without just pointing me to reference articles I've already read :)

Well it does - the "preservation library" is still part of that same site collection. If the site collection is gone, so is anything stored in the preservation library.

Yes....but my point is that O365 let me delete the Group containing the Site Collection that contained the records.  If that was expected behaviour, the records should still exist in tenant somewhere and be discoverable.

 

BTW that Preservation Hold library doesn't exist....because you can't delete records or retained documents in SharePoint.  Microsoft just haven't updated their documentation.

 

Will raise a ticket and thanks again for your time in trying to help me with this.

Hi Ady,

Did you get any official response from Microsoft on this issue. We are doing some research on groups and found this issue of owners able to delete everything related to the group, and records are not taken in count. On prem, when you try to delete a site collection having records in it will prevent you from doing so, same as deleting a content type in use.

Looks like we have a lot of gaps in SP Online.