Microsoft 365 retention policies are working silently and can delete your content from SharePoint sites that is older than retention period. How do you know what content is going to be deleted? Here is what you can do.
Recycle bin
Check you recycle bin regularly. If you found documents deleted by application (not by user) – that most likely means retention policy has acted. So you can restore document if you need it and check last modified date. If the file was deleted by policy – you can figure out – what is the policy configuration – number of years since document last modified date for the document to be deleted by policy. Or you can request this from your IT or Information Governance team. Knowing the policy – you can check if there are documents to be deleted soon.
How do i see what content is going to be deleted
The answer is simple: use search. Wherever you are now – you should be able to see a search bar at the top of your SharePoint site. This search bar is context-oriented, i.e. if you are working with a documents in a folder – you’ll search through this folder and below. To search through the documents library – navigate to the top of the library. To search through the all document libraries of the site – navigate to the site home page.
What to search for? Usually we search for a content (keywords) we know document we a looking for contains. But in this case we are not looking for a specific content, we are looking for all documents that were modified e.g. 3 years ago or earlier. This is where SharePoint Keyword Query Language (KQL) helps. Surely you know that any SharePoint document has properties – default ones – like document Title, Description, Author (who created document), Created – date when document was created – and you can create custom ones – e.g. library columns. But did you know that these properties can be used to refine your search.
E.g. if you are searching for the “ProjectA” and you know that John was working on that (or created or updated document), you can use serch query like “ProjectA Author:John”. The same way we can use such document properties as Created Date and Modified Date. Let say if today is June 19 2025 and you are looking for documents that will hit 5 years in a month, the search query would be: “LastModifiedTime<2020-07-19” or “LastModifiedTime<2020-07-19 Author:John”. Can be uset at any SharePoint site or your OneDrive.
Alternalively, you can search from SharePoint landing page or from Microsoft 365 home page and select last modified date via graphical user interface.