Data Retention & Archiving

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An open-source, AI-augmented platform for policy-based data retention, legal hold management, and defensible disposition across every data source an organisation touches.

Organisations accumulate vast volumes of email, documents, chat messages, and structured data. Keeping everything indefinitely is expensive and increases legal exposure; deleting data without a defensible policy invites regulatory sanctions. Data Retention & Archiving gives compliance teams, legal departments, and IT administrators a single platform to define retention schedules, enforce legal holds, and execute documented disposition workflows -- automating the entire data lifecycle from creation through deletion.

Why Data Retention & Archiving?

Incumbents are siloed. Email archivers (Mimecast, Barracuda) ignore collaboration channels; eDiscovery platforms (Everlaw, Relativity) lack proactive retention management. No single product spans both archiving/compliance and legal hold/eDiscovery at accessible pricing.
Enterprise pricing excludes the mid-market. Relativity contracts routinely reach six figures annually. Microsoft Purview's advanced capabilities require E5 licensing plus eDiscovery Premium add-ons. Organisations with 100--2,000 users are priced out of enterprise-grade tools.
Manual policy configuration is fragile. Most platforms require hand-written rules, regex patterns, or laborious label taxonomies. Smarsh's AI monitoring generates false positives requiring significant tuning; Purview's multi-jurisdictional policy configuration is notoriously difficult at scale.
Cross-platform legal holds are operationally painful. Placing a hold that spans M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and cloud storage today requires toggling between multiple vendor consoles with no unified audit trail.
No open-source alternative exists. Every enterprise-grade solution in this space is proprietary. Open-source components (MinIO, OpenSearch) are used internally by vendors but no cohesive open-source retention platform has emerged.

Key Features

Policy Engine & Retention Schedules

Configurable retention rules by data class, jurisdiction, regulatory requirement, and business unit
Support for deletion, archival, or migration actions at the end of retention periods
Multi-jurisdictional policy conflict resolution -- detect when GDPR erasure rights conflict with HIPAA retention requirements and surface reconciled options
Pre-configured compliance templates for GDPR, HIPAA, SOX, PCI-DSS, FINRA, and DPDPA

Legal Hold Management

Place custodians and data sources under hold to suspend normal deletion
Automated custodian notifications with acknowledgement tracking
Hold release workflows with full audit documentation
Cross-platform hold orchestration spanning M365, Google Workspace, Slack, and cloud storage from a single interface

Disposition & Defensible Deletion

Automated identification of records reaching end of retention period
Multi-stage approval chains with exception handling
Permanent deletion certificates with tamper-evident audit logs
Human-readable disposition narratives explaining why data was deleted

Search & eDiscovery

Full-text indexing across all archived content with Boolean, metadata, and date-range filtering
Chain of custody tracking throughout collection, review, and production
Export in standard formats (EML, PST, PDF, native) with custody metadata
Targeted collection tools for rapid response to regulatory requests

Multi-Source Connectors

Core: Microsoft 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, Teams), Google Workspace, local file storage
Extended: Slack, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Salesforce
Backlog: social media capture, structured database/ERP archiving, web archiving

Compliance Reporting

Dashboards showing active policies, legal holds, upcoming dispositions, and audit event logs
Scheduled reports demonstrating policy adherence and audit readiness
Compliance gap detection identifying data stores not covered by any retention policy

AI-Native Advantage

Traditional retention platforms require manual rule-writing, label taxonomies, and regex patterns to classify data. An AI-native approach autonomously categorises content into regulatory data classes without manual configuration, drafts initial retention schedules from a plain-language description of the organisation's regulatory environment, and flags records approaching disposition that may have outstanding legal or business relevance. AI-assisted legal hold scoping can suggest custodian lists and data sources likely relevant to a described matter, reducing the time and expertise required to initiate defensible preservation.

Tech Stack & Deployment

Immutable storage: S3 Object Lock (AWS), Azure Immutable Blob Storage, or NetApp WORM for SEC 17a-4 and FINRA compliance
Deployment modes: self-hosted, cloud, or hybrid -- with cross-border data residency controls for GDPR and similar regulations
Search infrastructure: full-text indexing at petabyte scale with metadata enrichment
API-first design: full-featured public REST API with OpenAPI specification for all core functions
Role-based access: separation of compliance administrators, IT operators, legal teams, and end users
Open standards: aligned with the EDRM framework and OAIS reference model (both open, no IP restrictions)

Market Context

The data retention, archiving, and eDiscovery market serves compliance officers, legal departments, records managers, and IT administrators across regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government, legal). Incumbent pricing ranges from per-mailbox SaaS subscriptions (Mimecast, Barracuda) to six-figure enterprise contracts (Relativity, Smarsh), with Microsoft Purview requiring E5 licensing for advanced automation. Demand is rated High, driven by rising data volumes and tightening multi-jurisdictional regulation.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase. Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.