A retention policy is a set of rules that determine the retention period for records in an entity. The retention period specifies how long the records must remain in the Data Vault before you can delete them. The retention period can be definite or indefinite. Records with definite retention periods have expiration dates. You can run the Purge Expired Records job to remove expired records from the Data Vault. Records with indefinite retention periods do not expire. You cannot delete them from the Data Vault.

Your organization might require that you enforce different retention rules for different records. For example, you might need to retain insurance policy records for five years after the insurance policy termination date. If messages exist against the insurance policy, you must retain records for five years after the most recent message date in different tables.

Data Archive allows you to create and implement different retention rules for different records. You can create a retention policy to addresses all of these needs.