Retention

A system's retention period is the minimum and/or maximum amount of days for which backups will be retained. The Backup Retention page allows the configuration of minimum and maximum retention days for each system.

For systems with applications, the minimum and maximum retention days can be set as an system level, application level, or virtual machine/database/storage group level. Clicking 'Apply' at the system level will apply the setting to the sub-items in the tree. Likewise, applying a setting to an application will apply the setting to each sub-item. Retention settings are shown as 0 when Not Set.

If you set Minimum Retention Goals and your system cannot achieve them, you will be alerted. If you set Maximum Retention Limits, backups (and dependent backups) will be deleted once the Master/Full is older than this limit, unless it is the last backup for that particular client, vm, or application instance. You should consider the frequency of Master backups in your schedules when setting the maximum limits since backups are deleted as a group (e.g., Master/Diff, Full/Incremental). If you set your maximum limit below the actual retention, backups will be deleted, and this process cannot be stopped.

BareMetal Backups

To elect to include BareMetal Backups in the Backup Retention page, ensure the checkbox in the bottom left corner is checked.

Legal Hold

Backups which are under Legal Hold protection will remain on the system until the protection expires. For as long as these backups are under Legal Hold protection, they will not be deleted from the system to make room for new backups and new backups will start failing if the system runs out of space. Legal Hold set on the Retention Settings page will apply to all backups that belong to the particular client, application, virtual machine or database. You can also place individual backups and their related backups on legal hold in Settings>Storage and Retention>Backup Browser.

You can view all the backups that are currently under Legal Hold protection in the Legal Hold Backups report.

Legal hold is not applicable to failed backups and System Metadata backups.