a. The length of time that records should be retained in offices before they are either transferred into archival custody or destroyed/deleted. As far as non-archival records are concerned the head of the office decides on the retention periods in accordance with the administrative use of the records and the legal obligations the records need to fulfill. In the case of archival records the National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Act, 1996 as amended, determines that such records must normally be kept for twenty years after the end of the year in which they were created, before they are transferred into archival custody. 

b. In an electronic document management system, the length of time a record is kept online before it is moved to near-line or off-line storage in a hierarchical storage management system.