Use retention categories to specify the period of time for which you want to keep items in the archives. You can give the retention categories meaningful names, such as Business or Personal. Retention categories make it easier for you to retrieve items because you can search for them by their category name. Each retention category has a retention period, which indicates how long you want to retain the items that are archived with this retention category.
For example, you can create a retention category named Finance Data Retention and set it to retain archived data for seven years.
The retention period starts on the date that the item is archived. Backup Exec runs a daily operation that deletes all items that have expired retention periods. You can prevent this operation from running on specific archives.
See Preventing the deletion of expired archived items from an archive.
You cannot delete retention categories. You can edit retention categories, including the retention periods.
Changes that you make to a retention category apply to the following:
You can create retention categories as needed when you create an archive job. You can also specify a retention category to use as the default setting for all archive jobs. If you do not specify a retention category, then a default retention category with a retention period of infinite is applied to an archive job.
More Information
Creating an Archiving Option archive job by setting job properties