Notifications for files deleted under retention policies

[Jonathan Herschel]

Hello,

I have a client who has implemented Retention policies to delete files on SharePoint after 2 years.  It is working as intended, but a pain point is users would like to be notified when a file was going to be deleted.  I've looked all through the MS Compliance Retention pages and haven't found the ability to send an email out to site owners when their files are about to meet the 2 year mark and get deleted.  Is there such ability?

I am not finding it and if not, can only think of the following solutions:

• Set alert on library for weekly deletions
• Create Views that show items modified 20-24 months ago (to be deleted)
• Send email to site owners with link to recycle bin to check monthly and pick the trash 🙂
• Use an admin tool such as ShareGate to provide site file reports of all files last modified 20-24 months ago.
• Maybe Set alert on Preservation Hold library to send Site Owners daily/weekly alert for items that are about to get deleted?

Am I missing something or does somebody have a better solution? Much thanks!

[#2]

Hi, nothing I'm aware of. Considering there has been a decision made to delete the information after 2 years, this organization might need to re-evaluate the retention policies settings instead of all these ad-hoc workarounds.

[#3]

Thanks Christian, agreed, it defeats the purpose. Can't have both.

In case anybody is following this thread, I did come up with Automated reports to send Site Owners a list of all files where the retention policy will be reached in the next 6 months so they can modify them before they get deleted. could probably do the same in PowerShell, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something like a checkbox somewhere...

[#4]

@HerschelJ, Can you tell me how you created the automated report of files about to reach the retention policy?

[#5]

I use ShareGate reporting tool to list all files a site that include the last modified and retention label column and export to excel to filter and sort all files modified over 5 years ago where retention label = our six year retention label and shows all files that will get deleted in the next year. Could also do the same in Powershell. Foreach library, show filename, last mod, modified by, label column and dump to csv.

[#6]

Site Owners could also create a weekly alert to show them all deleted files in case they want to pick the trash 🙂

[#7]

duh, even easier, if there are less than 5k files in your library create a view with those columns and export to excel no code, no 3rd party solutions... its Friday, I'm a little slow...