Retention Policy (Legacy Backup Format)

What Is Retention Policy?

A retention policy is a configuration of backup data keeping rules. This configuration defines the following principles of data management:

What data is kept
How long backup data is kept depending on types of data

Enterprise retention policy is intended to meet compliance or regulatory requirements and is a part of overall data management.

Data Retention In Legacy Backup Format

This paragraph describes the settings available for the retention policy in the legacy backup format.

The retention policy for backup plans in legacy backup format is based on object versions kept on backup storage.

You can configure a default retention policy or create a custom one for each backup plan in the legacy backup format.

Change Default Retention Policy

To customize the default retention policy settings, proceed as follows:

Click Tools.
In the horizontal bar, click Options.

In the Options property box, switch to the Retention Policy tab.

On this tab, specify the default retention policy settings that can be applied to legacy backup plans.

The following retention policy settings are available:

Delete versions older than. You can configure a backup service to delete file versions that were modified or uploaded to your backup storage more than a specified number of days ago. When enabling this option, you can also set the backup service always keep the last version of each file regardless of when they were backed up
Keep number of versions. You can specify the maximum number of versions kept on backup storage for each file
Purge delay. You can specify a retention period for which locally deleted files should be maintained in the backup storage before being purged. After these files become removed from the backup storage, you will no longer be able to restore them

Along with regular retention policy, for Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Storage, you can configure data lifecycle rules that define when and how to delete your data or move it to another storage class

The following retention policy settings are available:

Delete versions older than. You can make a backup service delete file versions that were modified or uploaded to your backup storage more than a certain number of days ago. When enabling this option, you can also make the backup service always keep the last version of each file regardless of when they were backed up
Keep number of versions. You can specify the maximum number of versions kept on backup storage for each file
Purge delay. You can specify a period of time for which locally deleted files should be maintained in the backup storage before being purged. After these files become removed from the backup storage, you will no longer be able to restore them