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Managing Legal Hold for Laptop Backups

Tenant or MSP administrators can use the Legal Hold feature to prevent deletion or aging of laptop backup data for legal or compliance reasons.

Enable Legal Hold to block retention-related and laptop retirement-related deletion, manual deletion, and ownership changes that would remove protected data, ensuring the data remains available for restore while the hold is active. You can enable Legal Hold at the user group, user, or individual laptop level.

Enabling Legal Hold enforces the following protections:

  • Laptop plan retention does not apply to the laptop data.

  • Users cannot manually delete laptops and backup data.

  • Users cannot change ownership of laptops.

  • Offline laptop management processes cannot delete laptops.

Enabling Legal Hold at the user group level causes all users in that group and their associated laptops to inherit the setting. Additionally, enabling Legal Hold at the user level causes their associated laptops to inherit the setting. Administrators can override inheritance by disabling Legal Hold for specific users or laptops.

Important

  • When you disable Legal Hold manually at a specific level (user or laptop), inheritance from the parent group is lost. You must manage the Legal Hold status manually at that level.

  • To simplify management and tracking of Legal Hold configurations, Metallic recommends creating a dedicated Legal Hold user group with users or laptops and enabling Legal Hold for this group. When the legal case or compliance requirement is resolved, remove the users from the user group.

  • If you delete a user group or user with Legal Hold status, the associated laptops will automatically lose their Legal Hold status. To retain laptop data after deleting the user group or user, you can manually enable legal hold for the required laptops.

Example Scenarios

  • User group status versus user status: If Legal Hold is enabled for a user group but disabled for an individual user who owns the laptop, the laptop will not inherit Legal Hold from the group. Manually disabling Legal Hold at the user level overrides inheritance from the parent user group.

  • Multiple laptop owners' have different Legal Hold status: If a laptop has multiple owners, and Legal Hold is enabled for at least one owner, the laptop will inherit Legal Hold status. This is because having at least one owner with Legal Hold ensures the laptop data remains protected.

Prerequisites
  • You must be a tenant administrator or an MSP administrator.
  • Identify whether you want to apply Legal Hold at the user group, user, or individual laptop level.

  1. From the navigation pane, go to Manage > Security.

  2. Click User Groups.

  3. Click the user group you want to manage.

  4. On the Overview tab, in General, click the Legal hold status toggle to the on position to enable legal hold for all users and laptops in that group.

All users and laptops under this group inherit the Legal Hold property. To exclude specific laptops or users, disable Legal Hold at their level.

  1. From the navigation pane, go to Manage > Security.

  2. Click Users.

  3. Click the user you want to manage.

  4. On the Overview tab, in User summary, click the Legal hold status toggle to the on position to enable legal hold for that user and their associated laptops.

  1. From the navigation pane, go to Protect > Laptops.

  2. Click the Laptops tab.

  3. Select the laptop you want to manage.

  4. On the Overview tab, in Summary, click the Legal hold status toggle to the on position to enable legal hold for that laptop.

  1. Access the relevant User Group, User, or Laptop page.

  2. Toggle Legal Hold to Disabled.

  3. The data resumes its original retention and data aging behavior based on the laptop plan.

After you disable Legal Hold, all data and versions that were previously protected will be subject to the original retention and data aging policies.

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