may contain multiple values the u201c retaindocumentfortime u201d instruction may also include units of time such as hours minutes weeks or days in practice the specific instructions may vary and are unless specified immaterial to this invention the specification may also determine what format the instructions of the policy is to take such as a set of xml codes a string of instruction parameter pairs etc in one embodiment corporate policy may dictate that emails generated by application 12 are to be kept for three years while accounting ledgers generated by application 14 are kept for seven years furthermore accounting ledgers may be stored in an image format to prevent subsequent tampering with the figures therein the rules for the universal policy creation specification may be broken down into three types valid value rules instruction specific rules and format rules in this embodiment the format rules may be as follows a policy may be a contiguous string of comma separated instructions of the form instruction 1 instruction 2 parameters may be a colon u2018 u2019 separated list of individual parameters of the form parameter 1 parameter 2 valid values for the length of time parameter of retaindocumentfortime may be x gt 0 where x is the length of time valid values for the units of time parameter of retaindocumentfortime may be u201c years u201d u201c months u201d u201c weeks u201d and u201c days u201d valid values for the image.