Backup job retention best practices

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    Overview

    Achieving a low-maintenance backup schedule with comfortable job retention periods is a measure of your backup policy success. Appropriate Job Retention and Recycling settings can ease the administrative burden of providing enough space for future backups to complete, while ensuring a known period of backups remain available for timely restores.

    Many factors contribute to the optimal recycling settings, including:

    • Overall size of backup jobs

    • Frequency of backup jobs scheduled

    • Total space on the Backup & Disaster Recovery appliance

    • If the replication is being used

      Everyone using byte-level replication need to use a schedule and retention policy that ensures you have sufficient time for a second full backup to completely replicate over to the secondary before purging the oldest or the original full backup. It is recommended to have a minimum of two full backups on appliance at a given time, preferred is three.

    • Exclusion settings (matchers) to make sure you are not backing up more information than is needed.

    Please set up you recycling settings keeping the above factors in mind, monitor, and change as needed until you achieve your optimal settings.

    Preserve Single Job Set

    Preserve Single Job Set setting tells the appliance not to recycle a job until a viable replacement exists. It is recommended to use to ensure that the most recent full backup and any subsequent differential or incremental backups stay on the appliance and are not deleted automatically.

    Learn more about Preserve Single Job Set.

    Set the appliance to notify about low disk space

    1. In the appliance Management Console, go to Settings.

    2. In the Monitoring group, click Email, configure email settings, and then click Apply.

    3. In the Monitoring group, click System Alerts.

    4. In the System Alerts group, select Disk Storage Utilization, and then click Submit.

    5. In the Monitoring group, click Disk Thresholds.

    6. In the Percentage of disk space remaining before sending warnings, specify the desired disk space in GB, and then click Submit.

    7. On the upper right, click Activate Configuration.

    Disable retention settings temporarily

    To temporarily disable retention settings:

    1. In the appliance Management Console, go to Settings.

    2. In the Backups group, clear Enable Automatic Job Management.

    3. Click Apply, and then click Activate Configuration.

      This will disable all retention settings globally.

    This is useful if:

    • you want to keep a job on the RAID a little bit longer than the retention settings allow, or

    • you are importing a backup job from an archive drive, and the job will be older than the current retention settings.

      If you do not disable retention, the job will import from the archive drive and will be immediately deleted as an expired backup.