New guide for archive owners

A practical checklist for permissions, retention and restore.

An archive owner is the person who can answer three questions without opening a ticket: who may add files, how long a deleted folder can be brought back, and which copy is the one we would trust on a bad morning. The new guide is that checklist, written in the order people actually meet the problems.

Name one owner

Shared folders drift when everyone is an administrator. The guide starts by asking for a single owner on each archive, plus a deputy who can restore but cannot change the retention rule. That split is deliberate. The person who can bring Tuesday's files back should not also be the person who can shorten the history those files depend on.

Invitations are listed with the date they were accepted. An invitation that has been sitting unaccepted for a month is shown as pending, not as a member. This sounds small. It stops a leavers list from looking shorter than it is.

Write the retention rule in one sentence

The guide asks the owner to finish the sentence "We keep deleted work for ___". The desk already has a control for this. What was missing was a place that shows the sentence next to the control, so a later owner can see why the number is 180 days rather than 30. Change the number and the sentence is stored with the change in the activity history.

Projects that must be kept longer, such as a signed lease or a set of drawings issued to a contractor, can be marked as held. A held folder is skipped by the ordinary deletion clock. It is not hidden, and it is not exempt from export.

Restore is a rehearsal, not a rescue

Once a quarter the guide asks the owner to restore one non-critical folder to a side location and compare the file count. The point is not to catch the service out. The point is that the owner has done the gestures before the day they matter: pick a date on the timeline, read the summary, confirm the destination, and check that the filenames came back with the same spelling.

We would rather a rehearsal fail on a Thursday than a recovery fail on the morning after an accident. The activity history keeps the rehearsal next to real restores, with the same wording, so the two do not become different rituals.

What the guide does not ask you to do

It does not ask you to reorganise the folders you already have. People find their work by the names they chose, and a tidy taxonomy imposed later is how files get lost. It does not ask you to turn on every log. The access log is recommended, and the guide says what it records, but an owner who is not ready can leave it off and still complete the rest of the checklist.

The guide is in the documentation and linked from the bottom of every new workspace. Older workspaces see it the next time an owner opens settings. If a step does not match the way your organisation already names responsibility, the help centre is the right place to say so. We would rather amend the checklist than watch people skip it.