Data Lifecycle Management allows compliance admins to retain, review and delete content in M365 workloads. Deletion of content to adhere to compliance requirements, admins can set up Retention policies or labels. To help prevent inadvertent data loss, M365 retention labels policies and M365 retention policies do not hard delete content immediately and keeps the data in Recycle Bins for 93 days for ODSP. Hard delete itself is a very costly process as it opens Microsoft to heavy legal implications in case of any data loss incident that may occur due to a misconfigured policy or regression. Priority Cleanup feature allows users to bypass retention, and eDiscovery holds to help customers comply to changing legal/compliance requirements or manage data spillage scenarios. This feature requires the ability to hard delete specific files from the scoped locations. Ability to select hard delete configuration for a Priority cleanup policy for OneDrive and SharePoint content and skip recycle bins.
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Updated October 1, 2026: We have updated the timeline. Thank you for your patience.
Introduction
We are introducing a new priority cleanup workflow in Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management that allows administrators to permanently delete (hard delete) specific OneDrive and SharePoint content types, even when retention policies or holds are in place. This capability helps reduce data exposure risk from rapidly growing Copilot-related content while maintaining compliance through required eDiscovery admin review and approval.
This change is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 558343.
Added to roadmap: 9 mrt 2026 | Last modified: 19 aug 2026
