How to enable Legal Hold using Parablu’s BluVault

What is a Legal Hold?

With Legal Hold or Litigation Hold, an organization can identify, isolate, and preserve relevant data that may be related to a legal action involving the organization. This ensures that the data related to the litigation are not destroyed and are available for the discovery process.

Considering that the legal information and other associated electronic data (such as emails and files) need long-term retention for legal purposes, along with using the Litigation Hold feature on your primary data copies (such as in Microsoft 365), it is also important to ensure that secondary data copies (such as backups) are also under Litigation Hold.

So, while it is understandable that primary data copies may get deleted by user actions – and need to be protected by the Microsoft 365 Litigation Hold feature, a good question is why backup data would get deleted.

Backup products usually have a retention mechanism built into them.  In order to keep secondary storage usage practical and limited, backup solutions tend to have an automatic data aging mechanism that prunes older backups automatically, based on set policies.  These policies could be enforced in the form of a date/time period, number of file versions, number of backup copies, etc.

So backup copies can indeed get deleted by this automatic aging process.  A Litigation Hold in the context of a backup solution would imply that this step temporarily suspends the automatic data aging process and ensures that no backups get deleted for the selected users – until such time the Backup Administrator removes the Litigation Hold flag on the user.

It is therefore important that there be an arrangement to ensure that neither Backup Administrators nor Users are able to delete users, devices, or data that is marked as being under Litigation Hold.

Enabling Legal Hold / Litigation Hold in Parablu’s BluVault

With Parablu, setting up and managing Legal Hold/Litigation Hold through policies is effective and easy. Follow the steps below to enable Legal Hold:

1. Login to the Parablu Portal

2. On the Parablu Portal home, click the Policy Management icon

3. On the Policy Management page, under Backup Policy Settings, click Backup Policies

4. On the Backup Policies page, click the Create New Policy button

5. On the Create New Policy page, give a name and a description to this policy and go to the Advanced tab

6. Under the Advanced tab, check the Enable Legal Hold option and include the System Folders backup option if desired

7. Click on Save to complete creating the policy

8. Once saved, apply this policy to identified users or systems 

Being prepared is important whether it is to preserve relevant information of any anticipated litigation or the possibility of unforeseen data protection threats. A comprehensive backup solution that offers privacy, confidentiality, and security of your digital assets can help you be prepared.  But make sure it also has a Litigation Hold option that you can use when you received a legal order to comply.

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