Create and Manage Google Vault Data Preservations

You can create Google Vault data preservations within Everlaw. The data preservations allow you to safely preserve data from across your Google organization without leaving Everlaw.

When you create a Google Vault data preservation within Everlaw, you mirror the steps for creating a hold within Google Vault, but without needing specific Google permissions and without needing to leave Everlaw. 

This article covers:

• How to create a Google Vault data preservation in Everlaw
• How to track existing Google Vault data preservations
• How to edit and delete existing Google Vault data preservations

Requirements

To create a Google Vault data preservation within Everlaw, you must:

• Be an Everlaw Organization Admin or Legal Hold Admin
• Have been added by a Google Super Admin/Everlaw Cloud Admin to the approved users on the Organization home > Cloud Management > Data preservations > Google Vault tab
  

Create a Google Vault data preservation

To create a data preservation for Google Vault data:

1. Go to Organization home > Legal Holds. Then, select View on the matter you want to create the data preservation in, or add a new matter.

2. Select + New > Data Preservation.
   
   This opens the New data preservation dialog.
3. Enter a name for the preservation in the Data preservation name field.
4. In the Select services field, choose Google Vault.
5. In the Select or create step,  select an already-existing Google Vault matter or create a new one.
   

When you're done, select Continue to move on to the Data Source step.

6. On the Data Source step, choose the data you want to preserve. To preserve data from more than one source you'll make a separate data preservation for each. 
   
   Select Next to move on to the Custodian step.
7. On the Custodian step, choose the custodians whose data you want to preserve. The selected custodians must come from your Google directory and have email addresses corresponding to a user in the Google account.
   
   Select Next to move on.
8. If you selected Gmail or Groups as the data source, you are taken to the Query step. Otherwise you are taken straight to the summary.
   On the Query step, you can optionally select the date range of data to preserve and enter keywords. To learn more about how Google queries work, see their Google Vault search documentation.
   
9. On the Summary step, review the details. 
   
   When you're done, select Submit. This creates the data preservation and syncs it to Google.

View and edit a data preservation

On the Legal Holds tab, data preservations are nested under the matter they belong to. Expand a matter to see any data preservations within it. To find a specific data preservation, enter a keyword to filter.

You can filter by: 

• Matter name
• Hold notice/data preservation name
• Matter field name
• Matter field values

The data preservation card displays all the high-level information about the data preservation:

• The status of the preservation
• The total number of errored, pending, active, and released custodians
• The directories used to create the data preservation
• The data sources preserved
• The date and keyword query, if any

To access a data preservation, select the View button. This takes you to the Summary tab for that data preservation's page.

From the data preservation page you can:

• See a summary of details about the data preservation
• View the custodians of the preservation, the data sources associated with them for this preservation, and details about the custodians
• Release custodians from the preservation individually or as a group
• Add custodians to the data preservation
• Delete the preservation
• Reactivate released custodians
• View and export activity within Everlaw on this preservation

Custodian status and details

To see the status of each data source belonging to each custodian in a table format, select Custodians. From here, you can also perform actions on subsets of custodians, including releasing active custodians, reactivating released custodians, or exporting reports.

Select a custodian to open a side panel with information about the custodian. 

The panel has two tabs:

• The Properties tab includes information about the custodian
• The Legal holds tab includes information about hold notices and data preservations to which this custodian belongs

On the bottom of the panel, select Export to export CSVs containing the information for this custodian. One CSV includes the information from the Properties tab and another CSV includes the information from the Legal holds tab.

Use the arrow buttons to toggle through the custodians.

Data preservation activity

To see all recorded activity on the data preservation, go to the Activity tab. From here, you can also:

• See who performed each action
• Filter the activity by date
• Export a report of all activity

Select the eye button in the View details column to see a detailed breakdown by custodian and data source for each event. This information is also included in the export.

To export this information, select Export to download. 

Modify a data preservation

You can modify a Google Vault data preservation in Everlaw by:

• Adding custodians to the data preservation
• Editing the query (for holds on chat and email data)
• For Google Chat, Google Voice, and Google Drive: update the items included in the preservation
  • Google Chat: Include or exclude conversations in Chat spaces
  • Google Voice: Include or exclude text messages, voicemails and their transcripts, and/or call logs and their recordings
  • Google Drive: Include or exclude items in shared drives

Add Custodians

Once you have created a data preservation, you might need to add additional custodians to it. Custodians that you want to add must already be added to the matter the preservation is housed in and must have an email address that corresponds to an account in your Google organization. To learn how to add custodians to a matter, see our article Manage Legal Holds in a Matter.

To add custodians to the preservation:

1. Select the three-dot menu, then select Add more custodians.
   This opens the Custodians to preserve step.
2. Select the custodians to add.
3. When you're done, select Next. You are taken to the Summary step of the preservation setup.
4. On the Summary step, select Submit. This adds the custodian to the preservation.

Edit the query

To edit the query:

1. From the Summary tab of the data preservation page, select Edit next to Query.
   
2. Enter the new query. It can be a date range, keywords, or both.
3. When you're done, select Save. This updates the query and data under hold for the preservation.

Release custodians from a data preservation

To release all custodians from a data preservation:

From the data preservation page, select Release all custodians. 

Once they're released, the preservation will update in Google Vault, too.

To release specific custodians from a data preservation:

1. Navigate to the Custodians tab of the data preservation.
2. Select the custodian(s) to release. Options for actions you can take are displayed.
3. Select Release.
   

Reactivate a data preservation

Once your data preservation has been released, you can reactivate it. To do so, select Reactivate all custodians at the top right of your data preservation. You are taken to a wizard to modify the query and data sources associated with this data preservation.

You can also reactivate individual custodians that have been released. To do so

1. Navigate to the Custodians tab of the data preservation.
2. Select the custodian(s) to release. Options for actions you can take are displayed.
3. Select Reactivate.
   

Delete a data preservation

To delete a data preservation:

1. Release all custodians.
2. From the data preservation page, select the three-dot menu, then Delete data preservation.
   

Deleting the data preservation in Everlaw does not delete the corresponding hold in Google Vault. To delete the released hold in Google Vault, you need to delete the hold in Google Vault itself.