How to have the ability to retain users' OneDrive content for 90 days, after they remove form their OneDrive recycle bin, and still let them delete folders regardless of whether these folders are empty or not?

Question

Hi there

We need to retain OneDrive users' deleted content for 90 days after they delete it from their Recycle Bin.
The retention policy causes an issue that users cannot delete their OneDrive folders (unless they are empty) and deleting all the subfolders/files etc. from a folder is too cumbersome.

How to have the ability to retain users' OneDrive content for 90 days, after they remove form their OneDrive recycle bin, and still let them delete folders regardless of whether these folders are empty or not?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi,

As per Microsoft, in Microsoft 365, items are retained for 93 days from the time you delete them from their original location. They stay in the site Recycle Bin the entire time, unless someone deletes them from there or empties that Recycle Bin. In that case, the items go to the site collection Recycle Bin, where they stay for the remainder of the 93 days unless:

the site collection Recycle Bin exceeds its quota and starts purging the oldest items

the items are manually deleted by the site collection administrator from the site collection Recycle Bin

The site Recycle Bin storage counts against your site collection storage quota and the List View Threshold. The amount of space allocated to the site collection Recycle Bin is 200% of the site collection quota. These values are not configurable.

However if you want to retain data for more than standard configuration you can implement Retention policies nd they always take precedence to the standard OneDrive deletion process, so content included in a policy could be deleted before 30 days or retained for longer than the OneDrive retention. depends on the plan you have. retention

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