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

Thanks Michael, appreciate it. All the best, Andy

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 :-)

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

Spread the word brother :-)

You are welcome :-)

You’re very welcome 😊

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

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.

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.

@@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.

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

Sure hope ll add it to my list of requests 😀

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

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

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

@@AndyMaloneMVP ok thanks

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

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

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

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

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

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

@@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?

@@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.

The policy affect the deleted item itself, irrelevant of where it stored

@@AndyMaloneMVP Thank you. So, documents NOT deleted in SP and EMails NOT deleted will remain in tact after the retention period has passed. Sorry if im asking the same/simular question again.

@@maycockman assuming that you’ve included these locations in the policy that is correct. However, you should always test policies before going live. 😀

@@AndyMaloneMVP Excellent, Good to know I will not lose data that is NOT deleted. Much appreciated.

It can some time to filter through the system.

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

@@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.

@@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

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

@@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.

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

​@@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.

I'm planning a whats new soon :-)