Retention is the concept of determining what data should be kept, for how long, as well as when and what data can be safely removed in order to free up disk space. Retention rules can be configured for individual Protected Items, or for Storage Vaults.
All Backup Intelligence retention rules are stackable, and they can be added automatically by Policy.
Retention (Protected Item)
In the Retention section, you can configure a retention policy to apply when backing up this Protected Item to a specific Storage Vault. If no policy is configured for a specific Storage Vault, the default retention policy for the Storage Vault will apply.
The retention section will display (default) to indicate that the Storage Vault default rules apply, Keep (X rules) to indicate that specific Protected Item retention rules have been applied.
Retention (Storage Vault)
Storage Vault retention rules are the default for all data stored, unless a Protected Item has its own set of retention rules. When a Storage Vault is first created, the default, no-change-by-policy retention rule is 'Keep all data forever'. This can be automatically altered by user-profile policy, or by later manual changes.
If a Protected Item is given its own set of retention rules, these Protected Item rules will normally take precedence over the Storage Vault retention rules.
If a Protected Item is removed from the list of things to backup, or has its retention rules removed, then the Storage Vault retention rules will take precedence once more, and the data associated with the Protected Item will be kept, or removed, in accordance with the Storage Vault retention rules.
Example usages of retention rules:
Change the default Storage Vault retention rule to 'Keep all data for 60 days', plus
add a Protected Item rule to keep all snapshots for 90-days, plus
add a Protected Item rule to keep a representative snapshot from each week, on a Monday at 6am, for 2 years.
A customer permanently retires a single device. The device is revoked from the user-profile list of devices. Once the device is deleted, the Protected Items for the device are also deleted, as well as any retention rules. The snapshot data will now be governed by the Storage Vault retention rules. If no changes have been made, the default Storage Vault retention rules are 'Keep all data forever', so the unwanted data from the Protected Item would never be deleted.
Explanation
When you revoke a device, it will remove all its Protected Items, and all of their retention rules.
If the user-profile still has at least one live device that stores data in the Storage Vault, it will run the retention pass into the Vault, eventually deleting the old Protected Item data.
Example Solution
Set all Storage Vaults to have a changed-default retention rule of 'keep all data for 60 days', or some other period.
When a device is revoked, or a Protected Item is removed from the list of Items to protect, the next retention pass will fallback to the Storage Vault rules.
A Storage Vault retention period of 60 days will allow for mistakes to be discovered. A mistakenly-deleted Protected Item can be reinstated into the list of things to protect; or the snapshots of the Protected Item can be restored via another device registered to the same user-profile.
A Storage Vault retention period of 60 days will allow for genuinely-unwanted data to be automatically removed at the end of 60 days, thereby keeping storage sizes to a minimum.
Retention Pass
A "retention pass" is the act of cleaning up data from the Storage Vault that exceeds the configured retention policy.
During a retention pass, Backup Intelligence looks at each backed-up job within the Storage Vault and determines whether it meets the retention policy. If the retention policy states that the backed-up job can be safely removed, the backed-up job is removed from the Storage Vault. Once all backed-up jobs are checked against the retention policy, any data chunks that are no longer referenced by a backed-up job can then be pruned to save disk space.
Automatic retention passes
A retention pass may run automatically after each backup job.
An automatic retention pass is not necessarily critical, and so if a backup job comes to an end without a retention pass being possible to run, the retention pass is not immediately "overdue".
The "overdue" rules for automatic retention passes are based on the time since the previous successful retention pass, and, the number of jobs exceeding the configured retention policy. The exact rules are subject to change in future versions of Backup Intelligence.
The rules are as follows:
If the device is a "high power" device:
Last retention pass | 0-2 jobs exceeding policy | 3-9 jobs | 10-49 jobs | 50+ jobs |
less than 24 hours ago | None | Attempt | Attempt | Require |
between 24 hours ago and 14 days ago | None | Attempt | Require | Require |
between 14 days ago and 21 days ago | Attempt | Attempt | Require | Require |
over 21 days ago, or never ran | Require | Require | Require | Require |
If the device is a "low power" device:
Last retention pass | 0-2 jobs exceeding policy | 3-9 jobs | 10-49 jobs | 50+ jobs |
less than 24 hours ago | None | None | None | Attempt |
between 24 hours ago and 14 days ago | None | None | Attempt | Require |
between 14 days ago and 21 days ago | None | Attempt | Attempt | Require |
over 21 days ago, or never ran | Attempt | Require | Require | Require |
In the above tables,
"None" means that no automatic retention pass will be attempted at the end of the backup job
"Attempt" means that Backup Intelligence will attempt a retention pass, but not throw an error if it could not be performed
"Require" means that Backup Intelligence will attempt a retention pass, and will throw an error if it could not be performed
A device is considered a "high power" device if it meets 2/3 of the criteria:
over 7 days uptime
running Windows Server or Linux
having over 8 GB physical RAM
Previous versions of Backup Intelligence between 19.12.4 and 21.9.2 inclusive always use the "high power" rules above.
Prior to Backup Intelligence 21.9.4, it was not possible to run backup and retention jobs simultaneously to the same Storage Vault.
Manual retention passes
You can run a retention pass for a Storage Vault on demand, by right-clicking the Storage Vault within the Backup Intelligence application, or an administrator can remotely initiate this by using the live-connection action from the Backup Intelligence web interface.
In this case because the action was explicitly taken, an error will be raised if the job fails to be performed for any reason.
Preferences
Backup Intelligence allows you to configure retention for a Storage Vault, as well as for a Protected Item / Storage Vault pair.
The retention rule for the pair will be used in preference to the retention rule for the Storage Vault. The retention rule for the Storage Vault is therefore only applied when
there is no overridden retention rule for the Protected Item / Storage Vault pair; or
the Protected Item is unknown, deleted, or belongs to a different Backup Intelligence user account
Retention policies
There are two categories of retention policy:
A policy that keeps all data forever, and
A policy that keeps data as long as it falls within any of a set of configurable ranges. You can combine multiple ranges to create a more complex policy.
Retention ranges
A retention range is a time period or job count during which a backup job should be kept.
The following ranges are available:
Range | Parameters | Description |
| Specify a number of backups to keep. | If the backup job was within the last |
| Specify a number of backups to keep. | The most recent backup job each day will be retained until |
| Specify a number of backups to keep. | The most recent backup job each day will be retained until |
| Specify a number of backups to keep. | The most recent backup job each day will be retained until |
| Specify a number of days, weeks, and/or months. | If the backup job occurred recently within the specified range, then the backup job will be kept |
| Specify a specific date. | If the backup job occurred after that specific date, then the backup job will be kept |
| Specify a number of days. | Backup Intelligence will keep the single first backup job from each of that most recent days |
| Specify a number of weeks, and a day of the week | Backup Intelligence will keep the single first backup job that occurred on that day of the week, for each of that number of most recent weeks |
| Specify a number of months, and a calendar date | Backup Intelligence will keep the single first backup job that occurred on that calendar date, for each of that number of most recent months |
