# Workspaces and archives

# Workspaces and archives

**Workspaces** are your committees and teams: each has its cases, tasks, calendar and files. **Archives** are where finished work rests under retention rules - preserved, then reviewed, never silently deleted.

**In short:** active work lives in workspaces; finished cases move to archives; retention review decides anonymization or destruction - legal hold excepted.

## Workspaces

1.  Create a workspace for each committee or team from the workspaces area.
2.  Work inside it: cases, tasks, notes, calendar and files stay grouped by committee.
3.  **Transfer a case** to another workspace when responsibility moves - the full timeline follows, so nothing is lost in the handoff.

## Archives and retention

Archiving a resolved case moves it through stages: **archived** (out of daily lists, history preserved) → **retention review** (someone decides its fate) → **anonymized or destroyed** (personal data removed or record deleted, per policy).

**Legal hold blocks everything.** A case under legal hold cannot be anonymized or destroyed until the hold is lifted - the system refuses, it does not warn-and-continue.

## What happens behind the scenes

Workspaces are permission boundaries: membership in a workspace decides which cases and files you see. Archiving only masks records from routine queries; the data and its audit trail stay intact until an explicit, reviewed disposition action runs. Destruction itself is controlled and logged - there is no silent delete anywhere in this lifecycle.

## See also

-   [Managing cases](/docs/guides-cases) - the case lifecycle.
-   [Notes, calendar and tasks](/docs/guides-notes-tasks) - workspace daily tools.