Basic 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, BDRSuite Backup Server will retain only the last 10 hours of recovery points of the backed-up machine.

Day Based Retention

The “day-based retention” feature in BDRSuite 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 BDRSuite 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 BDRSuite 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.

An example of how this feature might be used is as follows:

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 BDRSuite 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.