"Retain Items Forever", turn on\turn off

[RIck_Lange]

Question from a  fairly novice EV user.     Cur Ver 9.x

For a retention Category, we want to turn on the "Retain Items Forever" config option   which we understand will prevent  Storage Expiry and archive email removal  under that category.

Question is,  When it is removed at a future date  will  expiry / email deletion  then apply and work against the archived items?  Am assuming that is the case.

Recent requirements here dictate saving archived email starting at a specific date and leaving until a very specific future date.   Other retention \policy changes  will be going into effect during this special timeframe with storage Expiry enabled.

In essence can one with this option,  turn it off and at a later date turn it on so storage expiry will apply against the category?

Appreciate any assitance.

Rick

[MichelZ]

Yes, this is possible.

Changing a retention category's retention time is retrospective for already archived content.

Cheers

[Liam_Finn1]

I agree with Michel but you need to watch for some issues. If you leave retention set to keep forever then in 4 years time you change to to keep for one year when expiry next runs you will end up deleting 3 years of data which could run into millions of items. This will cause issues and chances are you will get errors during the expiry process as the system is just overloaded.

We run a similar process and what we have found to work best is when you decide to change from the keep forever do so in stages. If you know you have 3 years data to expire first run expiry in report mode to get the number of items to be expired. Then break that number down to delete year by year to bring you up to the desired date.

Early next year we are expecting to expire 25+ million items from our archive and that's just one years data. We have already decided that to prevent overloading the system we are going to do it month by month so our expiry will take 12 weeks to complete before we have reached the required date

[RIck_Lange]

Thank you both for feedback to my question.

That is that the setting can be used and works  as we thought,  and  we appreciate the implementation suggestion.