Litigation hold
A Litigation Hold in Microsoft 365 preserves all mailbox data / content, including deleted, original, and modified versions of items for the purpose of eDiscovery for legal purposes.
As we need to define litigation hold duration, so all deleted and modified content is safeguarded for a specific period until the Litigation Hold is removed.
We can place a mailbox on Litigation hold to retain all mailbox content, including deleted items and the original versions of modified items. When we place a user mailbox on Litigation hold, content in the user’s archive mailbox (if it’s enabled) is also retained. When you create a hold, you can specify a hold duration (also called a time-based hold) so that deleted and modified items are retained for a specified period and then permanently deleted from the mailbox. Or we can just retain content indefinitely (called an infinite hold) or until the Litigation hold is removed.
Here’s what happens when we create a Litigation hold.
- Items that are permanently deleted by the user are retained in the Recoverable Items folder in the user’s mailbox for the duration of the hold.
- Items that are purged from the Recoverable Items folder by the user are retained for the duration of the hold.
- The storage quota for the Recoverable Items folder is increased from 30 GB to 110 GB.
- Items in the user’s primary and the archive mailboxes are retained