Retention Vs Deletion! What really happens to your Data in Microsoft 365?

[@Timmy-Hi5]

CHEERS ANDY, JUST SAW YOUR CHANEL AND VERY SUPRISED YOU DON'T HAVE AT LEAST 1MIL FOLLOWERS ... AMAZING CONTENT

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Hey Tim thanks so much I really appreciate that. Like I've said, I've been going a short time and I'm trying to build. So its great to hear you're enjoying my content and welcome to my channel :-)

[@Timmy-Hi5]

@@AndyMaloneMVP ❤️, one of the best M365 content I've seen 🚀🇬🇧

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Spread the word brother :-)

[@JustSaying290]

Thanks Andy. Microsoft's features sometimes looks like they are overlapping so these overlaps gets me confused sometimes. Thankful for all your videos.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Thanks Michael, appreciate it. All the best, Andy

[@fbifido2]

@24:51 - Very Nice TIP 👍✔

[@markthompson1699]

It would be good to see a video of real world scenarios around this. I regularly have to deal with SARs in O365 and whilst the tools are there, they aren't always intuitive. What are the options available and the Pros and Cons of each...eg Litigation Hold & In-place Holds, what are your options after someone has left and is no longer licensed...

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Thanks and I will add that to my list :-)

[@johnwarde2409]

This is a great tutorial Andy, many thanks for taking time out to put it together. I'm interested to hear your views on the need for backing up data in Microsoft 365, despite the powerful data retention capabilities? There are plenty of M365 cloud backup solutions out there. My view is yes, it makes sense, in particular because data recovery is cumbersome and time consuming using M365 tools. What are your thoughts?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Professionally, I would recommend some kind of service that offers an immutable backup solution, like Quest or something similar, especially if you're in Hybrid.

[@oliverhuppe2415]

As Andy already stated, in my opinion retention is not Backup. Regarding the recovery the 3rd party services are much more comfortable and more granular.

[@johnwarde2409]

@@oliverhuppe2415 I'm with you on this Oliver. I've heard the argument that Backup isn't needed because of retention. I disagree with that view, retention doesn't do away with the need for a backup solution,. The best are those that are granular and have an easy to use and intuitive restore mechanism down to individual file/email level.

[@sujitdaswant5256]

Thanks Andy for sharing such great information about retention life cycle. I have two questions, 1) What date is considered in disposition review for reten the documents. I.e I have configured labels for as trigger when documents get modified. Weather it considered date which user modified the documents or document deleted date? 2)How may days document are gets stored in preservation hold libraries? Could you please make video on Legal hold scenario, how to implement and how its work.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Congrats your questions featured in this weeks Question Time. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aZnJo5WAaduMas0

[@sujitdaswant5256]

Hi @@AndyMaloneMVP , Thanks for giving the quick response of my questions. It will be helpful to me in my current implementation. You are doing great job for us keep going.

[@RP-fv7bd]

Ive been trying to use retention policies to automatically delete content from a mailbox after 1 day. I can create and apply the policy but nothing ever gets deleted. Am I misunderstanding something about the 'automatically' delete function of retention policies works?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

This is the wrong tool here. Use a mailbox rule instead 😊

[@issiewizzie]

does litigation hold in relation users account also apply to ie onedrive .... if the users account is deleed . can the onedrive still be kept

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

No it’s for exchange of my. However if you out the whole account on hold in eDiscovery n Entra then yes it does.

[@medlotfi4720]

Thanx Andy what is the Powershell command to delete a folder inside the inplace archive.? For a normal folder I find a way with SearchMailbox command and specify the target folder.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/policy-and-compliance/in-place-archiving/manage-archives?view=exchserver-2019

[@shaheenmarwari7458]

Thanks Andy

[@LiamGlanfield]

Thanks Andy, one thing I'm trying to achieve. Is automatically holding data for 6 years after an employee has left (all areas). As is a legal requirement in the UK. Then automatically deleting it afterwards. I wonder if this can be done as an action/policy after a user has been deleted. Litigation hold certainly helps, but it doesn't look to be managed for you.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Hi Liam thanks for your question. On reflection I tool another look at this question and decided to edit my answer. The fact that the employee has left the company and is probably no longer licensed, the only option here would be to either place the user on legal hold or export and archive the data out. Thanks again and delighted to hear from you.

[@georgelbenko]

Thank you for this great overview. One question to you. I have a file that somebody deleted a year ago. How would I go about retrieving it if it was under the keep forever retention policy.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

No, is the short answer. If you deleted a user account a year ago, then it is gone forever. Any documents or data that you placed on retention however, will still be retained but you may need to assign these to a different user. If you wanted to keep a user And the data in the system once they leave my suggestion is to place the user account on litigation hold. This will preserve the user account and data. Later when a replacement employee is found you can then assign the new user to this account. Full documentation on this is available at learn.microsoft.com

[@HeatherFaraDataGov]

If you have a retention policy for a type of data with legal rules and the site is deleted, how is the data protected? Does it simply prevent the site from being deleted or force review?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

I would look at the records management feature in the compliance centre for this. There are detailed descriptions of what you can do with your data both during and after the retention period

[@HeatherFaraDataGov]

​@@AndyMaloneMVP I am the data governance lead, yet I don't have global permissions. The administrators turned on auto expiration of teams in an admin panel somewhere to curb ballooning costs. Now sites get deleted due to owners being on furlough, sick, or not understanding email alerts to renew. I have loads of owners per site and regularly educate...still happens. I can't be on every site as an owner due to noise. I am the collection admin on all sites, but I don't get alerts. My best plan at the moment is to request weekly exports from the Sharepoint admin center and to set up alerts on a list that will tell me when a site hasn't been accessed in a week. Then I will manually contact owners. The only other solution is to add each site manually to the list of exceptions to the rule, which they refused to manage or do the work for.....Clearly the issue here is internal and poitical, but I am certain I am not alone in this. Admins can restore a site accidently deleted for a month, but after Microsoft autodeletes it's gone gone. We have eDiscovery set for 7yrs, so files are retained...but not the pages with all the context and guidance they need. I can only request a pulls by filename (in practice they find nothing in these searches because microsoft auto creates generic names for recording and such). If Purview can overide Microsoft's 'failure to renew' autodelete, when files in a site are flagged with rentention or sensitivity as described above. That would be amazing and solve the a very real compliance issue. Not al linfo in 365 is edited or accessed regularly - much is only needed seasonally for reporting, but I get that IT is also stressed by the ballooning cost and they need automated controls too.

[@MrHollowman23]

a retention policy was deleted or disable however the policy is still showing within the user email header any suggestion how to remove ?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

It can some time to filter through the system.

[@soodshubham7671]

Thank you Andy sir

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

You are welcome :-)

[@stephanielemejouk8127]

Thanks for this video. If I understand correctly, I can apply this data retention strategy to various locations. OK, but what if I want to apply it to everyone but a particular user for example? I have a case in hand, a user who unfortunately can't delete data from his full Onedrive space and would like to clean up but the retention strategy is set for 7 years. What is the best way to proceed to allow him to delete his data without having to add more Onedrive storage space as there is also a company policy that specifies a defined space size for Onedrive? Is it necessary to cancel the policy first? or delete it first and recreate it later? or is there another way? I am really new to all these processes and I like to learn new things Thank you very much

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

I would go into the existing policy and edit it. You can keep the policy but exclude the user. Then create a new one for that user.

[@stephanielemejouk8127]

@@AndyMaloneMVP ok thanks

[@medlotfi4720]

Thank you Andy very helpful, please Please is there a way to restore a hard deleted mailbox on office 365 (this mailbox had no litigation hold no retention policies)

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

If it was deleted less than 93 days, possibly. Other than that, unfortunately no, sorry.

[@medlotfi4720]

@@AndyMaloneMVPI've been going through all the Microsoft docs and there's no solution mentioned by them regarding this matter.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

@@medlotfi4720 your data is gone unless you backed it up

[@medlotfi4720]

@@AndyMaloneMVP that's what I'm receiving from another colleagues so it's gone forever no need to contact the Microsoft support.

[@pinankthakkar4122]

Hi Andy, I am bit confused. As per example used, After the email retention policy of 1 year is applied, will the user 1. Not be able to delete the emails of last 1 year or 2 User will be still able to delete, but the admin is able to retrieve them. (From where can i retrieve them) Revert will be highly appreciated.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

The rule remains in place for 1 year. After that the user can delete and it goes into the regular recycle bin system

[@NotYoAverageJoe]

@@AndyMaloneMVP The question is, when you have a 10 year retention policy applied and the user deletes an item within this period, being mail or SharePoint site, the item will go to recycle bin, purges etc. Where is this item retained, where do you get it back?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

@@NotYoAverageJoeyou can search for the item and restore it from the recycle bin. Microsoft are about to launch a new archiving service. Watch out for more details.

[@EarnPerView]

@@AndyMaloneMVP Hi Andy, I have the same kind of question. If a user deletes an email from their mailbox and recycle bin, and purges from their dumpster and say that the email was still in retention, (7 years), so where is that email kept now in Exchange?

[@oliverhuppe2415]

Thanks again Andy for sharing. I still have one question regarding retention. Lets say i habe got retention for one year and the option „delete after retention“ selected. If for example an email is in the inbox and i delete it, then it will be permanently deleted after the retention period. That is clear to me. But what is about content which is not deleted until retention ends? Is it also deleted because of the policy?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

In this case retention will always win over deletion. For example assuming that you had a Retention policy on a mailbox for one year. As I said in the video, the content would be retained for 12 months and then slip into a recycle bin system for a further 93 days. Only then would it be deleted. If you have any other retention policies, then retention will always win over deletion. You could always choose the not to delete option, because once the retention period ends it will not delete your content and you can then choose whether to keep it or delete it.. Thanks for the question and great to hear from you again

[@fnpaulinos]

Hi Andy! Thanks for the videos. It helps me a lot. As a new MS 365 admin, they're very useful. So, what's the purpose of the Preservation Hold Library folder? Does it exist only when I use Retention Policies? Thank you!

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

As I said in the video, only two things happen with your data, it’s either archived (retained) or deleted. In the case of archiving, you can also place items on litigation, or legal hold, that means that the item can be worked on it can be used but not deleted for legal reasons. Typically, this would be part of a forensic investigation. I am planning a dedicated session on this in the not too distant future, so keep your eyes open. Thanks again for the question

[@deltaperformance5606]

Hello Andy, I have a question. If I use in-place archiving in EXO and a user deletes a mail in his mainbox by default his mail goes straight to the bin and if he deletes it from the bin only an admin can restore it. is it posible to copy every mail to the archive?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

That’s basically legal hold. Yes you can do this. The recycle bin is never emptied.

[@deltaperformance5606]

@@AndyMaloneMVP Thank you for your answer. So it is not possible to have a copy of every mail in the archive folder? In this case we could use m365 instead of reddoxx as our archive solution.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

@@deltaperformance5606 To be honest the archive folder is part of the mailbox anyway. Depending on your plan, you may be limited in size. If however you have an E3 and above plan then you have unlimited storage. You could always create an inbox rule that would copy the mail from a specific email address, customer ECT to the archive. Either way you probably want to check out docs.microsoft.com to see what the archiving options are. The best of luck and thanks for the question

[@deltaperformance5606]

@@AndyMaloneMVP with Legal Hold it does not work either. I can delete the email from my deleted files and i cannot access it again.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

@@deltaperformance5606 things to check. Licence, items are deleted but user would not know. Recoverable via eDiscovery admin. Could be a timing issue. Place a support ticket of all else fails.

[@hhhennig]

Thx.. Andy

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

You’re very welcome 😊

[@mohammedhisham6114]

Thanks Andy! I appreciate it if you can cover in one of your tutorials deleting spoofy emails from users mailboxes.

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

Sure hope ll add it to my list of requests 😀

[@thbadmin7751]

Nice video...but things have changed here in September 2022, how about an update?

[@AndyMaloneMVP]

I'm planning a whats new soon :-)