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Creating a Legal Hold Policy

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Legal Hold policies are available as a part of Box Governance. Use Box Governance Legal Hold policies to retain designated content in your organization by placing certain files, folders, or custodians (managed users) under legal hold. Once under legal hold, content is prevented from being permanently deleted for as long as the Legal Hold policy is active.

You create Legal Hold policies either on custodians or on folders.

Creating a Legal Hold Policy on Custodians

Box enables you to place a legal hold on content owned by any managed users you designate as content custodians.

  1. Go to Admin Console > Governance.
  2. Click the Legal Holds tab.
  3. Click Create.
  4. Enter a Legal Hold Name (required) and a Description (optional). The name must be unique. The content of the Description field is included in the Reason for Hold column in a Legal Holds report. 
  5. In Apply Policy To, select Users (Custodians). See Selection of Custodian(s) for details about what content is held when you select custodians.
  6. In Date Range - Content Creation, optionally set a date range for held files. See Selection of Custodian(s) With a Date Range for details about how defining a Start Date or End Date value affects when content is held by the policy. 
    • Setting a date range is permanent for this legal hold. After the policy is made active, you cannot change the date range.
  7. Click Next.
  8. Click Add Custodians.
  9. In the Users box, type the names you want to add as custodians, and then click Add.
    • The user you add as custodians must already exist as managed users in your Box account.
  10.  Click Next and review the details of the legal hold.
  11. Click Start Policy.
    • Box applies the legal hold to all content that the users you've named as custodians own or are collaborated into at the moment the policy is made active, including content in Trash folders.
    • The content held is limited to content created or modified in the date range you selected.

Creating a Legal Hold Policy on Folders

Box enables you to place a legal hold on folders, regardless of who owns them.

  1. Go to Admin Console > Governance.
  2. Click the Legal Holds tab.
  3. Click Create.
  4. Enter a Legal Hold Name (required) and a Description (optional). The name must be unique. The content of the Description field is included in the Reason for Hold column in a Legal Holds report. 
  5. In Apply Policy To, select Folders.
  6. Click Next.
  7. Click Select Folders.
  8. In the Search box, enter all or part of the name of a folder you want to hold,, then press Enter. You can also filter by user name.
  9. Under Search Results, select the folders you want to add, and then click Choose.
  10. Review the details of the legal hold, and then click Next.
  11. Click Start Policy.

Box applies the legal hold to all content, including sub-folders, within the folders you selected.

 

Note

The amount of time Box needs to apply the legal hold policy (both initially and for any new files) depends on the number of files affected by the hold – the more objects you hold (files, folders, custodians), the longer it takes for the hold to become active. To verify that your legal hold is in fact applied, in your Admin Console navigate back to the Legal Holds tab and run a Legal Holds report to check for ongoing policies.

You can release a legal hold you've created at any time via the Legal Holds tab in the Admin Console.

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