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.

Enable the retention for your incremental backup by toggling the slider to the right. Once enabled you have to select the retention method to retain the restore points.

Basic Retention

Basic retention gives you the flexibility to determine whether to retain a specific number of incremental versions or to specify the number of days to preserve an incremental recovery point with the following version based and day based retention.

Version Based Retention

If you are selecting the version-based retention for the incremental backups, then you have to specify the number of versions to be retained. You can select from 1 to 999 versions.

Note: For example, if you configure hourly incremental backups and select ‘10 versions’ to retain, BDRCloud will retain only the last 10 hours of recovery points of the backed-up machine.

Day Based Retention

The “day-based retention” feature in BDRCloud allows users to specify the number of days that incremental recovery points should be retained. This means that users can select a specific number of days, such as 14, to retain 2 weeks of recovery points. Additionally, the “Minimum version(s)” option can be selected to avoid losing recovery points due to backup failures.

This ensures that the BDRCloud will retain the minimum number of recovery points specified in the “Minimum version(s)” field, even if the backup job does not run for a certain number of days. Without this option, the BDRCloud would remove all incremental recovery points. By default, the “Minimum version(s)” option is set to 3 versions, but it can be increased as needed.

Example

A user sets up the BDRSuite to perform hourly incremental backups. They then select the “day-based retention” option for the incremental backups and specify that they want to retain 14 days of incremental recovery points. The BDRCloud then begins performing hourly incremental backups and saves each recovery point for 14 days, as specified by the user. In total, the backup server retains 336 recovery points (14 days x 24 hours per day). When backup jobs are running successfully, the exceeding recovery points will be removed according to the “day-based retention” option. So, on the 15th day, the first day’s incremental data will be merged with the full backup and the incremental backup’s timestamp will be removed. However, if the backup job does not run for the next 15 days, all incremental recovery points should be removed according to the “day-based retention” option. But, If you have updated to keep “Minimum version(s)” as 24, as per the “Minimum version(s)” configuration, the BDRSuite will still retain 24 recovery points (one day’s worth of incremental timestamps). This ensures that a certain number of recovery points are always available, even if backup jobs are not running as expected.

GFS Backup

GFS stands for Grandfather, Father, and Son based retention that allows you to retain the recovery points of the backup jobs for long periods like weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Under the GFS retention, the weekly backups are referred to as “sons,” monthly backups as “fathers,” and yearly backups as “grandfathers”. BDRSuite Backup Server marks the GFS flag against the Additional full or Synthetic full backups or incremental backups.

There are two types of GFS retention; 1. GFS with Full Backups & 2. GFS with Incremental

Note: If you need to enable GFS retention, it is necessary to choose either one of the options in basic retention, as GFS retention works in combination with basic retention.

GFS with Full Backups

• The GFS restore points are created using additional full or synthetic full backups.
• The additional full backup or synthetic full backups are marked as weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly GFS recovery points.
• So, you should have already configured either the synthetic or additional full backup for the backup job.
• You can either choose weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly or any combination of GFS recovery points.

For example, If you want to retain 4 weeks, 12 months, 4 quarters of GFS recovery points, the available full backups in the backup repository will be marked as per the GFS retention schedule. So, based on this configuration, 20 GFS full recovery points will be retained at the end of the year.

GFS with Incremental

• The GFS restore points are created using incremental backups without including additional full or synthetic full backups.
• The incremental backups are marked as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly GFS restore points.
• On the successful completion of the 3rd-day’s first incremental backup, the 1st-day increments will get merged, to form a daily GFS recovery point. Similarly, on the 4th-day, the increments of the 2nd day will be consolidated as a single restore point and so on for the 5th-day and the 6th-day. This process continues to maintain the daily GFS recovery points.
• Similarly, if you choose weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly backups, the incremental backups from the previous week /month /quarter /year will be merged and a GFS recovery point will be created.