What is a retention policy for SharePoint Online?
SharePoint Online retention policy defines the set of rules in Microsoft Purview that help in managing the duration for how long site content or documents are stored or deleted permanently from SharePoint.
SharePoint retention policy settings help businesses manages how retention policy works for the SharePoint environment:
| Action | Reason |
|
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Why should you set up retention policies in SharePoint?
While working with SharePoint sites, you might need to implement retention policies. Two important reasons for setting up a retention policy are hereby mentioned.
- Legal undertakings: According to legal requirements, it is important for several industries to maintain a record of certain documents in the system for a specific duration of time.
- Prevent unintentional deletion: There are possibilities of deleting important files and documents unintentionally, and if you want to restore them later, retention policies are what will help with such situations.
- eDiscovery requirements: Several organizations that undergo audits, internal reviews, and investigations often need to retain certain information. With the retention policies defined and executed, they can go for simplified review using Microsoft Purview.
- Managed data loss risks: With the growth of data volume (Teams messages, emails, documents, etc.), management of data volumes becomes complicated. With retention policies in place, you can lower the risks associated with unmanaged data.
How does the retention policy affect the data in Office 365?
When any data is included in the retention policy, it does not show any symptoms or messages to the user. The user can continue to access their documents like nothing has changed. But, when the user deletes any item or changes them, a copy of the same file will be placed separately.
- OneDrive and SharePoint items are saved in the Preservation Hold library.
- The copy of Exchange mailboxes is saved in the Recoverable Items folder.
- The items of Teams and Viva Engage messages are retained in SubstrateHolds as a subfolder in the Recoverable Items folder of Exchange.
Retention policies and retention labels
There are two ways provided by Microsoft to apply retention settings to Microsoft 365. Here is a brief comparison before you apply them in SharePoint:
| Comparison aspect | Retention labels | Retention policies |
|---|---|---|
|
Objective |
Apply retention settings on items as granular level |
Apply retention settings on content stored at a specific Office 365 location |
|
What’s targeted |
Emails, files, and other items |
SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, etc. |
|
Application |
Applied manually by users or automatically by defining the rules |
Applied by policy configuration for defined locations |
|
Approach |
Content focused |
Centralized and location-oriented |
How to apply a retention policy on SharePoint Online items?
You can collectively apply a retention policy for SharePoint Online Site collection and even certain retention tags to an individual or all folders.
You can apply a retention label to any item like Word, Excel, or even OneNote files in a SharePoint library. The non-MS Office files like PDFs, images, notes, and sites are also available for retention.
SharePoint always keeps a copy of the deleted or modified documents, which are available in the Preservation Hold library. This will cause enhanced consumption of storage allocation.
How long does retention policies take to apply?
The time it takes for retention policies to take effect involves a multi-step process:
Upon creating and submitting a retention policy, you need to wait of up to seven days for its implementation:
- Distribution Phase: The retention policy initiates distribution to selected locations.
- Application Phase: Following distribution, the policy is applied to relevant content.
To monitor progress, check the distribution status on the Retention Policies page in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal. If you encounter delays, investigate by selecting the policy and reviewing the status in the flyout pane. If an error is indicated or if deployment is taking longer than expected, consider reattempting by executing the Set-AppRetentionCompliancePolicy or Set-RetentionCompliancePolicy PowerShell command.
Planning the SharePoint Online Retention Policy
Implementing a SharePoint Online retention policy requires understanding its impact on all documents, including those created pre-policy. Options include basing document retention on creation or last modified dates, affecting deletion timelines. This policy, once applied, universally affects a site’s documents, potentially leading to the immediate deletion of older documents. It’s crucial to communicate the policy’s workings to users clearly.
The policy permits customization in applying different retention durations to diverse documents and SharePoint sites. This aspect allows for the consideration of varying retention or deletion needs for specific documents. It also includes the possibility of user discretion in marking particular documents to be exempt from the retention policy.
Upon finalizing these considerations, you are all set to create the retention policy.
Create and Configure retention policies in Office 365 Admin Center
If you’re an unrestricted administrator, you can configure a retention policy for SharePoint Online using the following steps:
Step 1: Sign in to Microsoft Purview and go to Solutions >Data Lifecycle Management.
Step 2: Now go to Policies and then Retention Policies. Click +New retention policy.
Step 3: Name your policy and set the Assign admin units to the default Full Directory.
Step 4: Select Adaptive or Static from the Choose the type of retention policy to create page.
Note: Here, we are moving with the Static policy.
Step 5: Next, from Choose where to apply this policy, define SharePoint site locations
Step 6: From Decide if you want to retain content, delete it, or both page, adjust the retention settings. Click Next.
In the end, complete the configuration settings and save the SharePoint retention policy settings.
Limit policy changes with Preservation Lock
Use Preservation Lock to control modifications to policies. In certain instances, organizations must adhere to regulatory mandates like SEC Rule 17a-4, stipulating that once a retention policy is activated, it must remain enabled or become more stringent.
Preservation Lock safeguard, ensuring compliance with such regulations. This feature essentially locks a retention policy or retention label policy, preventing any modifications—be it turning off the policy, deletion, or relaxation of restrictions—by anyone, including administrators.
Releasing a policy for retention
When you are releasing retention policies for SharePoint, the content that needs to be retained will be preserved for a grace period of 30 days to prevent any data loss.
In this 30-day grace period, the deleted content is also retained and added to the Preservation Hold library. However, as a result, the timer job of cleaning these files recurringly is suspended. It allows you to restore these items if you need them.
Note: An exemption to the grace period is that if you amend this policy to spare a few SharePoint sites, the timer job will delete these files in the location of the Preservation Hold library without waiting for 30 days.
Retention or Backup: What to choose?
Retention policies allow SharePoint administrators to recover deleted files in SharePoint and OneDrive before their retention period expires. While these policies protect SharePoint site data beyond the extended period, they aren’t considered an alternative to regular backups. Microsoft is not accountable to back up your data.
SharePoint admins use professional tools and software to take SharePoint backups to avoid losing critical data in unexpected circumstances. Kernel SharePoint Backup tool helps you backup SharePoint sites, subsites, and other data.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ans: Retention policies in Microsoft 365 help you define a set of rules to establish a time period for which the information will be retained. Additionally, it also mentions what will happen to that data once the cycle ends.
Ans: Retention policies are applicable across various platforms, including:
1. Exchange Mailboxes
2. SharePoint Classic and Communication Sites
3. Skype for Business
4. Microsoft 365 Group Mailboxes and Sites
5. OneDrive Accounts
6. Exchange Public Folders
7. Teams Channel Messages (both Standard and Shared Channels)
8. Viva Engage Community Messages
9. Teams Chats and Copilot Interactions
10. Teams Private Channel Messages
11. Viva Engage User Messages
Ans:To check SharePoint retention policies, follow the given steps:
1. Login to Office 365 as an admin and go to Microsoft Purview or Compliance Center.
2. Click on Policies and then Policy lookup on the Policies/Data lifecycle management page.
3. Select Site from dropdown and enter the URL of the site to view policies and click Search.
4. You can see all the applied policies and make edits if required.
Ans. Once the retention period for any set of data stored within SharePoint ends, the data is moved to the second-staged recycle bin. And once the period of 93 days is over, there’re permanently deleted from the server.
