This article explains how Microsoft retention settings can impact your migration.
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Microsoft retention settings
The Microsoft retention settings include retention policies and retention labels. These settings can be used to help you retain content for a set amount of time or permanently delete old content that is no longer needed.
Each Microsoft workspace (for example, Teams, Outlook, etc.) has a separate retention setting. You can choose to set just a retention policy, just a retention label, or a combination.
For more information on retention settings, see the Microsoft article, Learn about retention policies and retention labels.
Retention policies
ShareGate is unable to migrate items that already exist at the destination if they have a retention policy on them.
To edit or exclude a specific SharePoint site from your retention policy, see the Microsoft article, Exclude or remove sites from a SharePoint Online retention policy. Once you have removed the retention policy, run your migration again.
Retention labels
The migration of your retention labels is supported when you migrate using Insane mode with your source and destination site collections in the same Microsoft 365 tenant.
There are a few things to consider:
If you migrate a retention label after editing your retention label at the source, the label applied at the destination will be the current one.
When migrating list items, the default retention label at the destination will be applied if the source item has no retention label.
When migrating documents, the source label is always applied at the destination.
When migrating list folders that have a retention label, a warning might come up that reads: Value does not fall within the expected range. This is a generic warning that should have no impact on your migration.
Note: When retention labels are migrated using Normal mode, the retention label must be manually applied at the destination. The date on the label will show as the migration date and the user will be the user account used to migrate. In this case, the retention label will be applied from the migration date and not from the date the label was applied at the source. The user and date values are not directly visible in SharePoint, you will only see the name of the label. This can be problematic if you use the setting when it was labeled in your retention settings.