Retention schedules (auto-archive or remove after N years)

Councils, clinics and schools carry legal retention periods — "minutes: keep 6 years", "incident reports: keep 25". GDPR’s storage-limitation principle puts a softer version of the same duty on everyone. FileDeck’s AI tier can enforce those periods: set a period on a category, and documents are archived or removed automatically when their time runs out, with an audit trail that proves what happened and under which rule.

FileDeck AI tier — periods on categories; the switch and preview under Documents → Retention.

Setting a schedule

1. Edit a category under Documents → Document Categories and set Retention period: a number of years, then archive (move to draft) or move to trash.
2. Check Documents → Retention — it lists everything due in the next 30 days, as a preview, before anything is enforced.
3. When the list looks right, turn on enforcement under Documents → Settings → Privacy & integrity → Retention schedules.

A single document can override its category: the Retention control in its editor offers its own period, or Exempt — keep forever, which always wins.

How enforcement behaves (the safety posture)

• Two locks. Nothing happens until a rule exists and the global switch is on — a half-configured rule can never fire.
• Trash, never hard-delete. "Remove" means the WordPress trash, with its normal recovery window. "Archive" means draft: gone from every library, history intact.
• Capped per day (50 by default, filterable). A new rule over a ten-year backlog becomes a visible daily drip you can stop, not a mass deletion.
• The longest rule wins when a document sits in several ruled categories — retention duties say "keep at least N years", so the safe merge is the maximum.
• The clock runs from publication date (filterable via filedeck_retention_basis).
• Every action lands in the activity log as a retention event naming the rule, and fires filedeck_retention_applied for anything downstream.

Retention vs expiry vs review cycles

Expiry hides a document on a chosen date — a per-document editorial decision. Review cycles nag a human to re-read it. Retention is the records-management duty: a class of document, a period in years, and an automatic, audited end state.