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Retention Policies and SharePoint sites

Iron Contributor

We have five year retention policies covering almost everything, including Teams. When a site is deleted, e.g. by deleting a team, all files contained in the site are retained. But what about the site (including lists etc.)?

 

If a user wants to recover a site (after 30 days in the recycle bin has passed), is it only the files that can be recovered? If so, is it possible to identify which files were stored in the site? 

51 Replies

@Scot Bickell  I tried to replicate the problem you experienced and couldn't. Can you give the exact steps to reproduce?

 

In saying this, I acknowledge that some moving parts are shifting in the service and what you see might not be what I see...

@Tony Redmond 

 

1) Identify which site you want to change the URL on.   If it has the yellow box in the properties telling you that there is a compliance policy blocking the deletion, then the URL Edit link seems to be greyed out, and you can't click on it to initiate a URL change.  

 

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2) In the Retention policy that covers SharePoint sites, add the URL to the Excluded sites list and wait around 15-30 minutes,

 

3) check the site properties and the retention policy warning should be gone and the Edit button should be clickable. 

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4)  Change the site URL

5)  Add the new site URL to the retention policy list of Excluded list.  Upon saving the policy, you might get the Client Error.   

 

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6) Allow time for whatever indexing or sync needs to happen between the retention policies and any url address changes.  (In my case 24 hours was sufficient, which I realized today  --11/14/19.)


I would imagine that it is not normally necessary to exclude the site in the retention policy after a URL change, unless you have a good reason to not retain the data, or if you actually want to delete the site.

If you try to add the new URL to the list of Excluded sites immediately after the change, you might get the Client Error showing the 500 server error in the details.   After 24 hours, I did not get the error and was able to add the new URL to the list of Excluded sites.

I am guessing that this is because it takes time for the retention policy to sync or reindex the sites in the SPO tenancy.   Perhaps in your environment, the sync/indexing happens much sooner than in ours and that is why you could not replicate my issue. 

@Scot Bickell  Yep. I see errors in the retention policy.

 

I think the issue is that the site URLs held in the properties of the retention policy are hard coded and are not updated when a site rename occurs.

 

I'll flag the issue to Microsoft.

That's great!

As long as I have your "ear", so to speak, I have a post in the SharePoint community that no one seems to have an answer for. Do you know any SharePoint Online gurus that might know the answer to this:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Incoming-Webhook-Webpart-How-to-manage-the-cards/m...

Sorry this is off topic for Office 365 admin issues, but I'll take whatever exposure I can get. 

@Scot Bickell Sorry. Zero idea.

Hi together,

 

just wanted to let know we have the exact same issue. From support I got the feedback that Microsoft is aware but she didn't say she is working on a fix about hat.

Main problem is that sites can't excluded from a "general" retention policy.

I was successful in delete some sites by support but we have now over 1000 stale sites and should delete most of them.

 @Tony Redmond maybe you can rise again this problem at the developers at microsoft, we don't seem to be the only ones having this. In EXO it works just to add the Mailbox to exclusion in the retention policy, in SPO when adding a site there comes an error after the sync period. Some months ago it wasn't even possible to select a site there, now at least the selection is possible but saving doesn't work.

Thanks!

 

 

@Jonathan Klein-Wiele I've flagged the issue (again). Nothing much will happen until the new year. I'll keep an eye on what transpires.

I'm glad I found this thread. This is exactly what I need to solve as well. 

I've noticed that my policies are always in a state of pending. It's been about 6 months since we put this retention policy on - and it's still pending!?

 

Name : Office 365 Global Retention CCC
DistributionStatus : Pending

 

@Tony Redmond 

I am also facing this issue. Are there any updates?

I too am facing this issue. We've turned off retention on SharePoint and I believe o365 groups. I can delete regular (non associated o365) team sites. However anything that was marked with office 365 group I can't delete. In some cases the o365 group no longer exists (but I don't have the yellow bar prompt saying that would stop deletion). Just the regular compliance policy bar.

Also having the same issues= as others here and no matter what I do I cannot delete the Removed Team sites out of SharePoint Management.

I have removed all Retention Policies and Groups associated.

Cannot remove site via Powershell either.

 

I have a ticket logged with Microsoft and are struggling to resolve this.

NZTECH_0-1587764774416.png

 

@NZTECH Probably a remnant policy (not visible in the UI) is blocking this action.

Go into the Security & Compliance Powershell module and run:

Get-CCRetentionCompliancePolicy | select Name,Guid

(I have the 'CC' command prefix set on connection). Deliver this overview to Microsoft Support and they can check if there are still other policy Guids present in the system which are faulty and then proceed to remove them.

I had great help BTW! Good luck