Ownership Changed, Retention Did Not: Identifying Orphaned Retention Policies and Storage Bloat After Department Handover

Storage Growth & Anomaly Diagnostics

During routine quarterly infrastructure auditing, differential snapshot analysis highlighted an abrupt stagnation in data lifecycle purging across the shared departmental mount points. Following an organizational restructuring where the core applications team assumed control over historical analytics buckets, ownership tags were updated in Active Directory, yet baseline automated lifecycle rules failed to map onto the newly assigned security identifiers. Over four consecutive snapshot intervals, unpurged staging tables and temporary archive tarballs accumulated 38.4 TB of stale volume capacity.

TreeSize comparative analysis and snapshot diff inspection revealed that over 140,000 intermediate export files had exceeded their 90-day retention ceiling without triggering eviction alarms. The delta analyzer caught the anomaly by cross-referencing snapshot metadata changes against modification timestamps, confirming that zero read/write operations had taken place on the affected directories for over five months despite consistent capacity billing increases.