[theeyescanner]

Yeah this is pretty much the only thing protecting us from Records Retention Policy(tm). Because the legal office thinks discovery is toooooooo risky, we have to delete all of the information we used to develop long lived business processes.

When I wrote this god and I understood it, now god only knows.

[cagey]

The last [US] BigCorp I worked for deployed (in Outlook) automatic deletion of all emails older than their Records Retention threshold. It was incredibly frustrating to have essentially all design/rationale history (from the key players involved) go into the auto-shredder with nobody but me caring. The only workarounds that could avoid the auto-shredder were enormously labor intensive, and of course, debatably violated Record Retention policy.

[jburgess777]

I never understood the mindset which seemed to interpret “we must preserve this for 5 years” as “we must _delete_ everything after 5 years”. I understand they want to minimize storage costs but they are destroying institutional knowledge. I have recently wanted to refer back to my notes on some older services and discovered that all my old notes have been deleted.

[jemmyw]

I think the rationale is that they don't want any liable behavior to be discoverable. Institutional knowledge could be in a controlled document storage and the email thread where you negotiated some kickbacks 6 years ago is shredded.