Retention Behavior for Exchange Mailbox (On-Prem & O365 Cloud Apps)

Hi ​@Ananth Sriraman 

What is the CV version being used here?

Hi ​@Ananth Sriraman 

Good day!

Yes, you are right

• In Commvault, retention policies define how long data (like deleted messages) is kept—e.g., 5 years.

• Once the retention period expires, the index is dropped, making the data non-browsable and non-restorable.

• However, the actual data still exists in storage until it is explicitly removed.

• This is where the true-up process comes in—it acts as a cleanup mechanism.

• True-up checks for data that:

• Has exceeded the retention period.

• Is no longer referenced by any active jobs or indexes.

• Once identified, this data is marked for pruning (deletion) from storage.

​@Syed_S 

Thanks for the explanation.
I would like to understand how we can identify and delete the data from storage.
Is it possible to do this directly from Commvault?

What do you mean by true up check and is it a manual action or something we can enforce at plan level?

Note: ​@CV_GK  - we are running V11.36

Regards

Ananth

Guys, 

Anyone can help me with above question, How to delete the data from the backend storage after the retentions?

Also let me know how the retention behaves for one drive, teams and sharepoint.

Regards

Ananth

Hi ​@Ananth Sriraman 

Good day!

True Up checks whether an item has exceeded its retention period and is no longer referenced by any active jobs or indexes.

In Commvault, Office 365 data is handled using soft deletion rather than hard deletion. Since these backups follow a Forever Incremental model, once the retention period expires, the associated index is dropped. This makes the data non-browsable and non-restorable, although it is not immediately deleted from disk.

I have talked with Commvault about this various times and the answer I got was that the data is never pruned from storage, you will not get back that storage space. “Soft deletion” is the nice way of saying you won’t ever reclaim storage space. Unless there is a fix for that, but I haven’t heard anything.

​@Syed_S 

Thanks for the response, but how to get them deleted from storage when its beyond the retention

​@KurtLO Thanks for sharing your findings

Regards

Ananth