Introduction

This article walks SharePoint site administrators through setting up classic retention policies. Retention policies can be used to clean up documents or even versions.

Instructions

1. Your Site Collection Administrator must activate Site Collection Feature Library and Folder Based Retention. Select the Gear icon (top right corner) > Site Information > View All Site Settings > Site collection features > locate Library and Folder Based Retention and select Activate beside it.
2. In the library where you wish to configure retention, go to Gear > Library Settings > Information management policy settings (if you do not see this option, the feature from step 1 still needs to be activated).
3. Change the source of retention for this library from Content Types to Library and Folders.

4. From the Edit Policy screen you will now set up a retention stage.

5. In the stage properties pop-up window define the trigger for the action (usually created or modified date).
6. Under Action, set the action you want (move to recycle bin, hard delete, delete previous version, etc.).

What is Recurrence?

Without recurrence selected, the retention action will be executed on an individual document only once. If the document is being deleted or moved to recycle bin, no recurrence is needed. However, if you want to repeatedly check documents for previous versions (and your document is always being updated) and delete all previous versions except the last, then you may need to check Recurrence. Otherwise, after an initial run, previous versions will start to pile up again.

Retention scheduling

Microsoft controls the schedule of the timer job that kicks off retention policies. The job usually runs once per week over the weekend. This means, that the retention action may not kick off on the exact date the time period expires so don't panic if you still see documents after the time period specified in the policy.