# What is Data Retention?

> Data retention is the deliberate management of how long data is kept — balancing legal and business requirements to retain it against the risk that accumulated data becomes a breach and privacy liability.

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## Content

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 schedules:** Retention periods, storage location, and deletion method should follow the data’s classification and legal basis, not convenience.
- **Working deletion:** A retention policy without working deletion — including in backups, replicas, and archives — is aspiration, not compliance.
- **Important limitation:** Retention 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.

### Related terms

[Data classification](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-classification/>) · [Data governance](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-governance/>) · [General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) security](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/general-data-protection-regulation-security/>) · [Backup](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/backup/>) · [Data privacy](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/data-privacy/>)

### Sources

[EUR-Lex, General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj/eng) · [NIST Privacy Framework](https://www.nist.gov/privacy-framework)

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