ECS 3.6.2 Data Access Guide

Retention periods

Retention periods are assigned in the C-Clip for the object by the CAS application.

For example, if a financial document must be retained for three years from its creation date, then a three-year retention period is specified in the C-Clip associated with the financial document. It is also possible to specify that the document is retained indefinitely.

Retention policies (retention classes)

Retention policies enable retention use cases to be captured and applied to C-Clips. For example, different types of documents could have different retention periods. You could require the following retention periods:

• Financial: 3 years
• Legal: 5 years
• Email: 6 months

When a retention policy is applied to a number of C-Clips, by changing the policy, the retention period changes for all objects to which the policy applies.

Retention policies are associated with namespaces in ECS and are recognized by the CAS application as retention classes.

ECS bucket-level retention and CAS

Bucket-level retention is not the default pool retention in Centera. In ECS, CAS default retention is constantly zero.

Default retention period in objects written without object-level retention in Compliance namespaces

Starting with ECS 3.0, when an application writes C-Clips with no object retention to an ECS CAS bucket in a Compliance namespace, and the bucket has a retention value (6 months, for example), the default retention period of infinite (-1) will be assigned to the C-Clips. The C-Clips can never be deleted because their effective retention period is the longest one between the two: the bucket-level retention period and the default object-level retention.

CAS precedence

When multiple retention periods are applied to a CAS object in ECS, the retention period with the higher value has precedence no matter how the retention was applied.

How to apply CAS retention

You can define retention polices for namespaces in the ECS Portal or with the ECS Management API. See Set up namespace retention policies.

Your external CAS application can assign a fixed retention period or a retention policy to the C-Clip during its creation.

When applying retention periods through APIs, specify the period in seconds.

Note that ECS CAS takes the creation time of the C-Clip for all retention related calculations and not the migration time.

How to create retention policies with the ECS Management API.

You can find more information about the ECS Management API in ECS Management REST API introduction. The online reference is here: ECS API Reference.