Introduction
Effective retention and recovery strategies help protect sensitive information, support regulatory compliance, and ensure operational resilience. As organizations generate more data across Microsoft 365, it's important to manage the entire content lifecycle—from creation to deletion, and even recovery after accidental loss.
Microsoft Purview supports this by offering tools to apply retention at both the container and item level. It also lets you define when data should be deleted and restore access when content is removed or changed. Security teams can use retention labels, policies, and recovery tools to enforce data governance requirements and reduce the risk of data loss or oversharing.
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you'll be able to:
- Plan retention and disposition using retention labels.
- Create, publish, and automatically apply retention labels.
- Use adaptive scopes to target users, groups, or sites dynamically.
- Configure retention policies for Microsoft 365 workloads.
- Interpret the outcome when multiple retention settings apply.
- Restore deleted items and previous versions of content across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.