Retention Policies in SharePoint and how to Apply on SharePoint Online?

Read time 6 minutes

In modern business organizations, the size and volume of data are increasing exponentially, and storage space is filling quickly. Cloud platforms give the flexibility to increase the storage space, but it requires constant monitoring and management to protect the data. The number of emails, attachments, documents, chat messages, and other items fill any storage in the least time. Efficient management is necessary due to the following reasons-

• Reduce the risk of data loss due to litigation or login breach – Deleting older and unimportant data and saving accounts from unauthorized access.
• Following the industry regulation and protocols – Several industry regulations compel businesses to keep their older data indefinitely. For example, in the United States, the business must follow the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, in which you must keep the document for seven years. Best SharePoint Backup Solutions maintain the data structure and help the user keep optimum use of the retention policy.
• Sharing useful knowledge between the users – You should help the users provide the latest and relevant information for completing their tasks.

Retention settings in Office 365 help the business to centralize the control of managing their content two actions mainly-

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 symptom or message to the data. 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. SharePoint items are saved in the Preservation Hold library.

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.

The retention policy is not a rigid system, but a flexible policy creates different approaches to protect data from various threats. There are several pre-defined compliances that you can also apply to the policies.

1. First, log in to Microsoft 365 Admin Center and go to the Admin application.
2. In the Admin Centers, click Compliance.
3. Choose the Data Loss Prevention option.
4. In the DLP section, you must create a new policy for your business. Go to the Policies tab and click Create Policy.
5. In the first step to create a DLP policy, there are several categories that you can choose. You should also choose the country or region for the business. Make your selection and click Next.
6. In the example, a U.S Patriotic Act has been selected as the policy. You can provide a new name and description. Click Next.
7. In Choose locations to apply the policy, you should disable others and choose SharePoint sites. Use Include or Exclude to select parts of sites. Click Next.
8. On the Define Policy Settings page, you can either follow the same settings in the selected policy or create a custom setting by providing additional details. Click Next.
9. Choose the option to detect when the policy will work on Office 365 data. Then, click Next.
10. Select the protection actions and use the checkbox to select useful actions. Click Next.
11. Choose who has access to shared SharePoint and OneDrive files. You can also leave the settings to their default type. Click Next.
12. You can test the policy, turn it on or off instantly, or keep it off. Make your choice and click Next.
13. Review the settings of the created policy. Click Submit after you are satisfied with the terms of the policy.

It will take approximately 24 hours to finalize and enable the policy for the entire organization. After that, you can apply this policy to any item in SharePoint Sites.

Conclusion

To recover deleted files from OneDrive and SharePoint is next to impossible if you do not have a proper backup. That’s where the Retention Policies save the data from being deleted abruptly. Retention policies may not be enough to backup your SharePoint library, site, or site collections. So, it would be best to use professional backup software specializing in SharePoint because it can help overcome many avoidable mistakes in SharePoint migration.

Kernel Migrator for SharePoint is one such tool that backups all the contents of SharePoint. Also, the SharePoint Migration tool will migrate the data to a new account as per the user’s needs.