SharePoint Online Retention Reduction

Question

When We put the System Live we put in a 15 year retention policy, we now want to Reduce this to clear a lot a of stale data. Ideally the set-up i want is that data that has been deleted from a sharepoint site is retained for 7 days then is removed. but anything not deleted is retained. indefinitely. we have 10 terabyte in PHL and 1.5 in recycle bin so my upstanding is that the above would allow us to save a lot of data, how do i set my retention possible to do the above. or am i better to set it to retain for 7 days then do nothing and do a manual Clean-up of the Preservation Hold Libraries? my concern is if do 7days and since last modified it will delete pretty much everything in all my sharepoint sites

Answer 1

Hi @Michael Groombridge,

Thank you for posting in this community.

The retention policy for SharePoint Online is for the retention of saved data and does not include retention of deleted data.By default, SharePoint Online retains deleted data in the Recycle Bin (First-Stage) for another 30 days. If deleted data remains in the Recycle Bin (First-Stage) for more than 30 days or is deleted in the Recycle Bin (First-Stage), then the data is moved to the Recycle Bin (Second-Stage) and remains there until the 93rd day of deletion.

Reference:

SharePoint Online data deletion in Microsoft 365

How retention works for SharePoint and OneDrive

For undeleted data, if you want to keep it forever, just set the retention policy to "Retain items forever".

If you don't know how to set up a retention policy, please refer to this article: Create and configure a retention policy.

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Answer 2

Hi @Michael Groombridge,

Thank you for your reply.

Q1: How to review or usage of SharePoint?

We can view all site usage reports in the M365 Admin Center.

Please refer this article: Microsoft 365 Reports in the admin center - SharePoint site usage

If you would like to see further usage reports for a particular site, you can navigate to Site Usage in the Site Content section of your site collection.

Please refer this article: View usage data for your SharePoint site

Q2: Automatic file deletion after 7 days of retention

We can move the files to be deleted to a site and set retention policies for that site separately.

We just need to choose where to apply this policy in the "Choose where to apply this policy" step. Please choose different settings depending on the type of your site.

The policy is set to keep items for 7 days when they are created and delete them automatically.

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