Migration to SPO - Retention Policies

[JSlei]

Hi, 

I have a client who has been on SPO for a year now.  They also have SP 2013 and they are getting ready to migrate to SPO. However, they have retention policies turned on, on all SP sites in SPO. They can't turn them off, due to legal reasons. I ran a couple of test migrations, and I do get some errors because the migration tool has to create and delete elements during the migration process to reproduce what we have at the source. Question is, has anyone had to migrate to SPO with retention policies turned on in the destination tenant and did you run into any major issues? Thank you!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@JSlei I've had this issue. The solution was to exclude the sites I was migrating from the retention policy before copying content and then enable it after the migration was completed. I made this a step in the UAT process. You can use this process to remove sites that you want to delete also. 

Note that the retention policy takes 24 hours to apply, so you need to do this the day before migrating.