Onedrive retention File retention and deletion

Question

Hi Team,

Hope you are doing good.

I have multifold questions with regards to Onedrive retention and Deletion, i am looking to implement a file deletion policy for files older than 5 years in users onedrive.

a. will user be notified before the file is going to be deleted from this policy?
b. We want files to be deleted based on created or modified date, will this work by creating two polices, (one based on each attribute), if we do this, which policy will take precedenceon weather a file is deleted, we have seen a few cases where the created date on file is newer than the modified date attribute, so we only want to delete files based on which ever date is most recent?

Awaiting response, Thanks.

Answer 1

No, users are generally not notified when documents subject to retention policies "expire". You can however integrate this into a workflow or run a script periodically I suppose. If you want to leverage a built-in feature, take a look into disposition, though it's probably an overkill for your scenario: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/disposition?view=o365-worldwide
You can create multiple policies as needed, but do keep the "principles of retention" in mind: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/compliance/retention?view=o365-worldwide#the-principles-of-retention-or-what-takes-precedence
"Shortest deletion period" wins, unless you also use policies that have a "retain" action. In which case, retention always wins.