Retention and legal holds

The rules that flag, archive, and trim documents, the purge window that makes deletion safe, and holds that freeze everything under them.

What it is for

Retention is how a workspace stays current without anyone deleting the wrong thing. Rules per collection flag documents for review after a period, archive old ones, and trim old versions. Nothing is deleted automatically, ever; the rules set things aside for a person to decide.

The three things most people do

Set a policy on a collection. Open Retention. For each collection choose Review after a number of months (the document is flagged for review that long after its latest upload or last review), Archive after a number of months (moved to Archived, out of every list, file kept, restorable), and Keep only the last N versions. Save in place.

Work the review queue. The queue lists everything the rules or a person have set aside: due for review, archived, and deleted documents waiting for purge. Mark a document reviewed, restore an archived one, or let a deletion stand.

Place a legal hold. A hold is a named freeze on a collection or a document: nothing under it can be archived, deleted, purged, trimmed, or flagged until the hold is released. Use it for an audit, a dispute, or any time someone says "keep everything."

The purge window

Deleting a document in Sources does not remove it. It goes to the review queue as deleted, awaiting purge, with a Restore button, and its file is kept for the purge window (thirty days by default). Only when the window ends does the purge job remove the file. This is why there is no "delete permanently right now" button: the window is the safety net, and it is short enough that storage is not wasted.

The one mistake to avoid

Setting an archive period before the dictionary is approved. Archived documents leave the assistant's reach; a document the dictionary depends on should be reviewed, not archived, until its entries are approved.