Retroactively Changing Retention on archived items

Lets say you have the following

\My Archived Items\ -- set to a Forever Retention

You decide you no longer want all items in \My Archived Items\ to be a "Forever retention"
You can change the retention category via EVPM to be something like "7 Years"
If you apply that retentioon category to \My Archived Items\ it will only affect newly archived items

OR you can just change the "Forever Retention" from Forever to 7 years, and anything under that retention category would be 7 years now instead of Forever

However, that would affect ALL items in that retentioon category for everyone in your environment.

So the other way you could do it is to run an EVPM script that creates a folder called
\My Archived Items - 7 Years\ and apply a 7 year retention category to it

Then you can move items in Virtual Vault from \My Archived Items\ to \My Archived Items - 7 Years\
Or if you use shortcuts, you can move the shortcuts and have it update

However if you don't have virtual vault, this will not be possible, since Archive Explorer or EV11's new search do not allow moves.

Also with later versions of Enterprise Vault, Retention Category changes to items cannot be made depending on your options.

For instance there is an option to only update categories if the items new retention is LONGER than the original - i.e. you can set it from a 3 year retention to a 7 year retention, but you can't go from a 7 year retention to a 3 year retention

Another option in there as well is you can't move items from one retention if the old retention does NOT allow deletes but the new retention DOES allow deletes, so you'd need to disable that

ANOTHER option you could do to avoid duplicates is to export \My Archived Items\ to PST file and choose the option in the VAC to delete the items as they're exported, then reimport the PST file, and there will be no duplicates because the others were deleted, and it should now have the new retention category

So either
1. Edit the existing retention category to be shorter
2. Use EVPM to create a new folder, and move the items to the new folder
3. Export out the folder choosing to delete from behind, update the retention category applied to a folder and reimport the PST file

As for the duplicates, you can contact support and ask for a copy of Enterprise Vault Duplicate Cleaner 

Check this page:

http://www.symantec.com/theme.jsp?themeid=enterprise-vault-extensions

At the bottom, see 'Classify' from Globanet

Perhaps that fits your need?

It doesn't, you'd have to select Export By path and the give it a folder to export from and choose to delete the items, just exporting alone won't work, you have to export using the folder path.

And the problem with moving shortcuts is you won't have shortcuts for all items
So if you have like \My Archived Items\ and in the archive it has 1000 items but in the mailbox you only have 100 shortcuts, when you move the shortcuts you will update those 100 items but then you will have 900 items left with the old retention.