Retention rules come from regulation, contracts, litigation holds, and business need; deletion duties come from privacy law, minimization principles, and security prudence. Keeping everything forever maximizes exposure: more data to breach, more to disclose, more to search in discovery.
Key points
Per-class schedulesRetention periods, storage location, and deletion method should follow the data’s classification and legal basis, not convenience.
Working deletionA retention policy without working deletion — including in backups, replicas, and archives — is aspiration, not compliance.
Important limitationRetention rules conflict constantly: privacy law says delete, litigation says preserve, and business wants history. The policy must arbitrate these per data class and jurisdiction — there is no universally “safe” retention period.