When does Retention kick in?
There are 4 ways to kick in the retention period:
1. un-assign policy from user
2. remove backup option from policy
3. disable the policy
4. delete a user from Google Workspace
When a user is offboarded, does the retention period kick in?
This depends on the offboarding step:
- Delete User - backup policy assignment is taken off for the user and retention starts
- Move User (changes the OU) - depends on the configuration of the new OU, if it has no backup policy or a policy with backup not enabled then retention starts
- Remove From Group (Smart Teams) - depends on the configuration of the new group, if it has no backup policy or a policy with backup not enabled then retention starts
If you want to double check what logic applies after a user has been moved or removed from a group, check where this user inherits backup configuration from: go to Directory > Users > click on the user > Actions dropdown > Inspect Configuration.
What happens if someone reapplies a backup policy?
If a user is being backed up and someone removes the backup policy, delta backups stop and the retention period kicks in. If someone later reapplies the backup policy or applies a different backup policy to the same user, depending on how much time has elapsed we may or may not take another initial backup, and in either case we’ll start delta backups from that point going forward.
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- Drive: we’ll take a new initial backup for drive after 2 days
- Mail: the API will check if the existing mail history ID we had stored is still valid or not, if it is valid then there won't be an initial backup
If someone changes retention to shorter, will it delete previous backups?
No. Changing the length of retention period changes how long we’ll keep backed up data for when the User/Shared Drive no longer has an active policy.