@pmoncho said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pmoncho said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@dashrender said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@scottalanmiller said in Email retention for non-regulated businesses?:

@pete-s In the US they tend to say "as short as possible." Email is always a legal quagmire and the best thing to do is to delete is as quickly as possible. Which, of course, can't be that fast. So we are generally talking 1-2 years. But you rarely want to keep it longer not because it likely contains details of people breaking the law, but because a legal discovery request is extremely expensive and a great way to attack even otherwise honorable businesses. It's a huge cost you can leverage against someone that they can only reasonably mitigate by not having much email to go through.

Man - that would be so awesome. But even if management did agree that - you'd have people that would be looking for ways to maintain the data for a much longer period - like printing and saving in a cabinet.. shudder.

I like many of the replies I get about cleaning out email. "Why, its free!" "Why, my 50 GB of email is nothing when we have 16TB drives for $200" "Why do I have to remove email older than 13 years, it isn't hurting anyone" "Why would I do that, I may need it later (Medicare Newsletters prior to 2010)" and the list goes on and on.

Exactly!

Then my next question is - if something is so important that you need to keep it - why is it in email in the first place? Why can't you get that data someplace else more related to whatever it is you're saving it for? (That said, I realize that other documentation for something simply don't exist).

Don't you dare get me started down this path. I had HUGE arguments about this with an ex-employee over the period of 10 years. The user could not/would not understand her email box is not a document database / DMS. The last I counted, she had over 300 different nested folders in her email.

Now that the user is gone, their mail copied to a shared mailbox for management to hunt/search and waste their time with if they choose.

It probably easier to have retention policy in place from the start.

If you know email retention is time-limited, you'd have to come up with some other way to store things.

But some people are just hopeless no matter what...

@IRJ said in Duplicati Retention Policy, which do YOU choose?:

@JasGot said in Duplicati Retention Policy, which do YOU choose?:

The options are:
Keep all backups
Delete Backups older than
Keep a Specific number of backups
Smart backup retention
Custom

Which do you use and why? I am interested in your choice and why you choose it.

Generally NO longer than legally required. Unless the legal requirement is something really lax. You generally dont want to keep data for longer than 7 years in any circumstance where there is no legal requirement, because you can become legally obligated to share data in a court case or something of that sort.

Exactly. Desired retention is more like 6 months. Only legal requirements make us go longer.

sadly - setting this didn't work as the 'mailbox' doesn't exist...

Curse you MS

@Breffni-Potter said:

Might be worth adding a media retention policy, I imagine you do the same for video which is far more expensive to store the raw, so add it for photography.

We don't have a written in stone policy, this kind of thing has to be flexible with the type of work, length and size of project. Generally for most clients it's gone within 30-90 days of final payment (which is when they get the deliverables). Broadcast TV stuff (not commercials) is usually kept a bit longer due to the nature of it.

Photoshoots are done in raw as well, and can easily be a few hundred gigs from one shoot.