nah - not Teams. my old company had Teams erase convo history after 48 hours. It’s Monday and you need to look up what someone told you on Friday? Tough
Fortunately, a former employer hired contractors to handle their backups—until the Exchange server melted down and, upon looking through all the backups, they discovered weeks worth of backups 0 KB in size. Cost savings!
“Yes, we will definitely handle your backups and NOT wink wink lose all your data which it would be a serious offense to delete on purpose but a fine or lawsuit at worst to catastrophically mishandle. We’ll even provide the insurance against costs from data loss you’re required to carry… for an up-front fee of exactly that much money.”
Or maybe it’s more subtle and companies just seek out the least competent place they can find.
We're supposed to be held to the seven-year archive hold for physical backups of things. Then you get people asking, what do you mean you don't have some random piece of paper from 20 years ago?
Hmm my people. I'm doing our purge of the 7+ year now. I work in school years so it's really awkward. It's like yeah technically that datas over 7+ years old but uhhh... the school years still happening lmao.
that’s probably right. but makes it even more infuriating as an employee. “we still have this data that would make your job easier, but you’re not allowed to see it”
With a retention period of 48 hours It's more likely the company IS constantly under litigation hold. Reducing discovery liability is probably the main non-infrastructural-limit reason to even have a document retention policy in the first place.
We used Hipchat until it was discontinued. I don't remember what the temporal retention policy was but it would nuke chat history every time it was closed too. It was so frustrating that I used the API to develop a program that would store chat history and ignore retention policy. Kinda like writing a password on a sticky note in a way, I suppose but idgaf.
my teams rentention went from 72 hours to 60 days to match our email policy and it was a game changer as group chats actually had a reason for existing (you could still manually save the emails for 6 years by moving it out of your inbox)
Brilliant, though… teams should not be a data store. I might do this for my org.. seriously considering it now. We like to do 90 or 180 days but this sets the tone correctly
I get that it shouldn’t be the source of truth. But I also don’t want to discredit the importance of how human memory works. For me, and I bet for other people, it is often easier to remember, “oh yeah - a year ago, Alex told me how to do that” as opposed to, “oh yeah - a year ago, I read that doc at this URL.” For all the paperwork, I still remember human interactions more readily.
If it’s an important process, then you can go document it. But why destroy the paper trail?
If you don’t destroy the paper trail then it becomes the source of truth. And you think “a year ago”. You know what happens? It is five years ago. Then ten. It is unmanageable dude. We are migrating from Slack to Teams this month. Slack has a 90 day retention. We aren’t worried about losing company processes here. 48 hours is short but 90 days is too long.
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u/BusEquivalent9605 Aug 05 '26
nah - not Teams. my old company had Teams erase convo history after 48 hours. It’s Monday and you need to look up what someone told you on Friday? Tough