Changing retention of existing material in archives??

[xgtdec]

Hi Guys

Very quick question....way back when the powers that be decided a certain department should have a 2 year retention for both file and mail. So everything in their archives has a 2 year retention!!

Now in their infinite wisdom they want this changed to 7 years...which is fair enough and im happy to proceed!

BUT.....im of the understanding that the 2 year retention will remain for all items currently archived, and the 7 year retention will only apply to items once i make the policy change and put it into production.

Is there a way to apply the 7 year policy to all involved "including" existing items in the archives?

Declan

[GertjanA]

Hi Declan,

If you change the EXISTING retention polic to be 7 years, your safe.

If you create a new retention policy then you have an issue.

As far as I know, the retention of an item is basically a number pointing to the 'retention definition record'.

If you change the retention policy itself (keep items for 7 years, instaed of 2 years), that number does not change, the retention will.

As example:

Use EnterpriseVaultDirectory

Select * from RetentionCategoryEntry

That will show all your retention categories. Note the field RetentionCategoryIdentity

Now look at your VaultStoredatabase, table Saveset. That has a field called the same! Hence, changing your RetentionCategory will be affecting already archived items, creating a new one will only affect new archived items.

[AndrewB]

to summarize, you can edit the settings of an existing retention category from the EV console and it will apply to anything that's been archived already and anything archived going forward with that policy.

however, it gets tricky when you need to retroactively separate different retentions for different data sets and all you have is one retention category.

[xgtdec]

Ok thats fair enough, we do have a lot of retention category and its a job for us to get these minimized as i'd say in reality we use 3 out of 20. 

The fact we use centera and everything is set not to delete anyway sort of makes retention a redundant point for now, but try explaining that to a user!!!!!

Many thanks for the replies!!!!!!!!!!!

Declan