Preserve (Legal Hold)
Preserve is an operator-only override that exempts a file, folder, or drive from retention locking — typically used to satisfy a legal hold or a client request to keep specific data active past its normal retention window.
What it exempts
Marking an item preserved excludes it from the archiving and vault-move sweep entirely, for as long as the hold is in place. Archiving and the move into the retention vault are a single step, so a preserved item is never picked up by that sweep in the first place.
Once a file is genuinely in the vault, it is locked by AWS or Azure themselves — not even BYOVault can remove that lock early. Preserve keeps a specific item out of that state altogether.
How it’s applied
Preserve is set by an operator from the dashboard, at three levels of granularity:
- a single file
- an entire folder
- an entire drive/mailbox
It is not exposed to end users through the self-service portal — applying a hold is always an operator-only action. Every use is written to the audit log along with which operator applied it.
Typical use
Use Preserve when a client or legal request requires specific data to remain outside the normal retention lifecycle — for example, a mailbox or drive subject to litigation hold, or a file a client has flagged for indefinite retention outside your standard policy.
It’s intentionally an operator-side control, kept separate from the automatic, tenant-wide retention schedule.