The retention policy allows you to specify the number of days or number of versions, an incremental recovery point should be retained for the backup job. By setting up the retention policy, the redundant data blocks of the older recovery points are deleted from the backup repository, thereby saving the storage space. If the retention for incremental backup is disabled, all restore points will be retained.

Retention for Incremental Backups

You can retain multiple versions of the backup in the backup server.  The BDRCloud Servers retains the version files at the backup server based on two types of retention:

Version-Based Retention

Version Based Retention will retain multiple versions of your backup in the backup server based on the value you provide. For example, if you have selected to keep the last 5 version(s) of the backup data, then the latest 5 versions of the backup data will be maintained in the BDRSuite backup server. When the sixth version of the file is created, it will automatically delete the first version. The count ‘5’ will be maintained at all times. This is the default retention type and the default value is ‘5’. Version count begins from ’00’ and runs up to ‘999’.

Time-Based Retention

Selecting Time-Based Retention will retain the version of your backup files in the backup server based on the age of the version. The period varies from the day, week, month, and year(default). The default count is for 5 years, which implies that until 5 years your version of the backup data will be retained in the BDRSuite backup server and will then be removed automatically. The maximum period that you can retain your files for is 10 years. You can further customize your retention based on two options provided:

• Keep all the versions within the selected time period.
• Keep only a particular number of versions within the selected time period.

Deleted File Retention

If the files that are configured for backup get deleted  after a backup schedule, then the backed-up data of those files will not be deleted in the BDRCloud Server. It will be marked as ‘Deleted’ during the subsequent backup schedule. The following options can be selected as per requirement.

• No of version(s) to be retained for deleted files can be selected and you can retain up to 99 versions of the deleted files.
• Keep all the versions of deleted files up to the particular number of year(s) chosen.
• Don’t retain deleted files. This option is not recommended.