By default, Spanning Backup for G Suite retains your data as long as users have Spanning Licenses. You can set up a mail retention policy which will delete any email messages in your backups with a received date older than the retention period set.

The email retention period will apply to all Spanning licensed users in your organization.

For example:

• An organization sets a 180 day email retention period in Spanning
• Spanning will delete all email messages in any backup with a received date greater than 180 days, and continue to do this on a daily basis automatically
• For new users being backed up after a retention policy is set, no emails older than the retention period will be backed up
• The mail retention policy setting for your domain is displayed on the Settings page. 

If Drive Retention is set to 2 years (720 days) and you create a new document in Drive, Spanning Backup will detect and backup the file.

• If you make no additional changes to the file, the backup will be deleted in 2 years.
• If you update the file in a year, for example, changing the heading from “2020 Annual Report” to “2021 Annual Report”, when the 2-year anniversary arrives, Spanning Backup will only delete the first version of the document, not the second. The two-year-old 2020 report will be deleted not the 1-year old version from 2021.

If you would like more information about mail retention, or would like to set up a policy for your organization, please contact support@spanning.com. The request to enable a mail retention policy must come from a Super Admin in the domain.