# Question about retentions

**URL:** <https://community.influxdata.com/t/question-about-retentions/6863>\
**Category:** Store\
**Created:** [October 3, 2018, 8:19am UTC](https://community.influxdata.com/t/question-about-retentions/6863 "2018-10-03T08:19:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![katy](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex023/user_avatar/community.influxdata.com/katy/32/855_2.png) [@katy](https://community.influxdata.com/u/katy)\
**Post date:** [February 4, 2019, 5:59pm UTC](https://community.influxdata.com/t/question-about-retentions/6863/4 "2019-02-04T17:59:59Z")

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The 7-day default splits the retention policy into 7-day windows. The expiry time is the time when the data is actually deleted.

The database will only drop whole shards at a time. If you use the `influx` cli to run `SHOW SHARDS` you should see a listing of your database with their respective shards. Each of those shards has an `expiry_time` . Each `check-interval` the database will drop any of the shards who’s expiry times are older than `time.Now()` .

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_[View the full topic](https://community.influxdata.com/t/question-about-retentions/6863)._