GFS Retention 

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 

Information 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. 

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