Environment
Retain Unified Archiving 4.3+
Deletion Management
Situation
Can you stop the Deletion Management from removing messages once a deletion job has started?
Resolution
No. Once the deletion job begins, it cannot be stopped.
It is highly recommended to wary of what to delete, before proceeding with a Deletion Job.
Cause
When the Deletion Management has started the job it runs a query on the indexes, base done on the criteria set within the profile. Once the query returns, the Deletion Management will create a report on what it will delete putting this report in the ../archive directory where the physical archives are stored. At the same time the Deletion Management flags each of the messages in the database to be deleted, marking them, and tracking them to be removed completely from the system indexes, metadata, and physical storage.
Once these occurrences take place the Deletion Job can no longer be reversed. Even after a restart of Retain, the database still has the data flagged and will resume the deletion of the messages upon startup.