Abstract: Organizations struggle to meet their obligation to preserve electronic documents when litigation occurs or is likely. This is particularly challenging in a hosted user environment using a distributed file system. Embodiments of the invention enable a user to preserve email, chats, text documents, and other electronic files in the native storage systems of these applications, or in a hosted eDiscovery archive that syncs with the native store. In an embodiment, the process uses a label to indicate that a particular document should not be deleted. When purging tasks occur, the documents with such labels are exempt from purging until the label is removed. Search queries may also be run on the documents in their native locations to identify those relevant to a litigation hold. Because the system operates on the native document store, a user is not required to create a copy of the document in order to preserve it.

Abstract: An electronic discovery archive can continuously pull documents and store them in a way that makes it easy to discover and put documents on litigation hold, independent of the native storage used by a given application. Users can continue to modify documents on litigation hold, and revisions are tracked and saved in the archive to comply with the litigation hold. A legal discovery system can then operate against the archive.