Releasing a policy for retention

 

Providing your policies for retention don't have a Preservation Lock, you can delete your policies at any time, which effectively turns off the retention settings for a retention policy, and retention labels can no longer be applied from retention label policies. Any previously applied retention labels remain with their configured retention settings and for these labels, you can still update the retention period when it's not based on when items were labeled. For more at Data Retention Policy

You can also keep a policy, but change the location status to off, or disable the policy. Another option is to reconfigure the policy so it no longer includes specific users, sites, groups, and so on.SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts:

When you release a retention policy for SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts, any content that's subject to retention from the policy continues to be retained for 30 days to prevent inadvertent data loss. During this 30-day grace period deleted files are still retained (files continue to be added to the Preservation Hold library), but the timer job that periodically cleans up the Preservation Hold library is suspended for these files so you can restore them if necessary.An exception to this 30-day grace period is when you update the policy to exclude one or more sites for SharePoint or accounts for OneDrive; in this case, the timer job deletes files for these locations in the Preservation Hold library without the 30-day delay.For more information about the Preservation Hold library, see How retention works for SharePoint and OneDrive.Because of the behavior during the grace period, if you re-enable the policy or change the location status back to on within 30 days, the policy resumes without any permanent data loss during this time.Exchange email and Microsoft 365 Groups When you release a retention policy for mailboxes that are inactive at the time the policy is released:

 

If the retention policy is explicitly applied to a mailbox, the retention settings no longer apply. With no retention settings applied, an inactive mailbox becomes eligible for automatic deletion in the usual way.An explicit retention policy requires either an adaptive policy scope, or a static policy scope with an include configuration that specified an active mailbox at the time the policy was applied and later became inactive.If the retention policy is implicitly applied to a mailbox and the configured retention action is to retain, the retention policy continues to apply and an inactive mailbox never becomes eligible for automatic deletion. When the retain action no longer applies because the retention period has expired, the Exchange admin can now manually delete the inactive mailbox.An implicit retention policy requires a static policy scope with the All recipients (for Exchange email) or All groups (for Microsoft 365 Groups) configuration.For more information about inactive mailboxes that have retention policies applied, see Inactive mailboxes and Microsoft 365 retention. For more at Data Retention Policy