By default, Spanning Backup for Google Workspace retains your data as long as users have Spanning licenses. You can set up an 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 applies to all Spanning licensed users in your organization.
For example:
- An organization sets a 180 day email retention period in Spanning.
- Spanning deletes all email messages in any backup with a received date greater than 180 days, and continues 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.