Setting Retention Period

How to set your archive's email retention period.

What is Retention Limit?

The Retention Limit is the number of days that emails will be retained by Cryoserver. The email date is used, and not the date on which the email was processed into Cryoserver, to decide whether it should be retained in the archive or not. Emails older than the retention period will be permanently deleted by a daily housekeeping task (that runs at midnight). The retention limit setting requires support to assist: you must provide some proof, for example a signed letter, that a specific retention period is to be applied. By default, Cryoserver will not remove any data.

Instead of, or in conjunction with, a retention limit it is now possible to set SEARCH DATE LIMITS. This will limit the earliest date that certain classes of user or local user accounts can set for any searches. This lets Administrators retain data for longer than your business actually requires or the users are aware of.

For retention to be fully successful, the NTP settings must be set up. This ensures that the Cryoserver clock is correct, and a malicious user cannot set the Cryoserver clock forward in order to force a large email deletion process. If the system detects local server clock drift when compared to a remote NTP service, then alerts will be raised. To change the retention date setting, Administrators will need a code which will be supplied by a Cryoserver support engineer. Again, this is to prevent the casual setting of the retention period which might cause large scale email deletion.

This guide is applicable only to cryoserver.online customers. Not applicable for .cloud and on-premises customers.

Changing your Retention Settings

1. Navigate to Adv Configuration > Retention Limit within the Classic Admin Area.

2. Click the Change Retention Period link.

3. Enter the desired retention period and click the Submit button.

   

   Retention Period Setting
4. Notify & Await Approval by your archive's Data Guardians.

Data Guardian Approval

When you or your colleagues submit a request to change the retention period in your archive, you will need to obtain approval from the designated data guardians of your archive.

Depending on how your archive is set up, the default process will demand approval from two data guardians for the retention change request. This approach is aimed at enhancing the security of your archive's data and minimising modifications that could potentially affect data integrity.

Granting Approval

Requires Data Guardian (DG) Account

To authorise a request for changing retention, the DG needs to follow the steps outlined below:

1. Log in to your Archive using the new user interface, i.e. https://app.archive.cryoserver.online for UK cloud customers or for EU cloud customers please use: https://app.eu.cryoserver.online. On the login page enter your Tagname. Login with your default username and password pr press the authenticate with Microsoft 365 / Azure AD button.

   

   Screenshot of login page with illustration of demo as the tagname
2. Once logged in, click on your profile icon located at the top right corner of the screen.

   
3. From the menu, select "Change User."

4. Pick the user labeled as "Data Guardian."

   
5. Once you have switched to the Data Guardian profile, your enter the Data Guardian area. On the navigation bar - click on "Requests." menu item.

   

   Data Guardian Requests
6. Identify the specific request you want to manage, and Press Open.

   

   Requests screen to Approve.
7. Choose whether to "Approve" or "Decline" the request.

   

   Approve / Decline Requests

It's worth noting that, as mentioned earlier, most systems necessitate approval from two data guardians to process and approve a retention request. If a request still requires additional approval from another data guardian, its status will change to "Part Approved," indicating the need for another data guardian's approval.