Forage Labels and Rules, in Plain Words
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Where content classification is enabled on a deployment.
Read this before the guides on labels, rules and what they found.
Picture a clerk who goes through every file, one at a time.
- The labels are a box of coloured stickers. Each sticker is just a name, such as "Bank details" or "Payment card", with a description and how sensitive it is: its severity, from Routine to Highest. A sticker does nothing on its own. Creating a label puts it on no file.
- The rules are the sheet of instructions. Each rule tells the clerk when to use which sticker. For example: "if you see a 16-digit number that passes the card number check, put the Payment card sticker on it."
- Forage is the clerk. It goes through every file, follows every active rule, and puts on the stickers the rules call for. For each sticker it keeps a note of which rule put it there, and what it saw.
Why labels and rules are separate
- You can change how something is found without changing what it is called. Improve the card number rule, and the files it finds still get the same Payment card label, so your counts and reports keep their meaning. Renaming a label, or changing its description or severity, changes no rule and checks no file again.
- Several rules can give the same label. One rule can find card numbers inside files, and another can give the same label to every file whose name contains "card statement". Both add to one Payment card count, and a file found by both is counted once.
Why the checked figure drops when rules change
A file is checked when Forage has compared it with the rules that are active now. When you switch a rule on or off, the sheet of instructions has changed, so every file checked against the old sheet must be checked again against the new one. The checked figure drops at once, then climbs back as Forage works through the files again.
Nothing is lost: the labels already on a file stay until Forage checks that file again, and every rule version that has been active is kept as history.
Retention rules are a different thing
A label says what a file contains. A retention rule is designed to say how long a file must be kept, and what happens to it after that. Retention rules are not yet available. A label never decides how long anything is kept.
See what each page shows for the rest of the Records section, and limitations for what Forage does not do.
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