File Retention Deferred Update

Before enabling file retention, see File Retention Management in Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Administration Guide, Release OS8.8.x.

File retention is advantageous for meeting data governance needs, especially for records retention compliance, and legal holds on files. The file retention feature provides the ability to mark individual files in a share to be retained until a future date, each retained file has its own expiration timestamp. A retained file can never be modified, even after its expiration, and those modifications include its name, attributes, and ACL. After the retention timestamp has passed, however, the file can be deleted. The retention policy is set at share creation and defaults to the same retention policy and periods as the parent project. For more information on the advantages of file retention, as well as implementation details, see File Retention Management in Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Administration Guide, Release OS8.8.x.

File retention can be set to off (default), privileged, or mandatory. After setting privileged or mandatory file retention, you define the retention periods: minimum, maximum, default, and optional grace period.

Caution:

Mandatory file retention affects the filesystem, project, and storage pool. Even the root user cannot shorten the retention period nor delete a retained file, its filesystem, its project, nor its storage pool before the retention timestamp has passed for all retained files. Carefully plan mandatory usage so that storage resources, especially pools and their associated drives, are not consumed for longer than necessary or overfilled.