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Finally, we create retention rules for the archive: let us retain only backups that are no older than six
months, and let the cleanup be performed after each backup task and also on the last day of every
month.
Retention rules
: Delete backups older than
6 months
Apply the rules
:
After backing up
,
On schedule
Cleanup schedule
:
Monthly
, on the
Last day
of
All months
, at
10:00 PM
By default, a backup is not deleted as long as it has dependent backups that must be kept. For
example, if a full backup has become subject to deletion, but there are incremental or differential
backups that depend on it, the deletion is postponed until all the dependent backups can be deleted
as well.
For more information, see Retention rules (p. 39).
Resulting tasks
Any custom scheme always produces three backup tasks and—in case the retention rules are
specified—a cleanup task. Each task is listed in the list of tasks either as
Scheduled
(if the schedule
has been set up) or as
Manual
(if the schedule has not been set up).
You can manually run any backup task or cleanup task at any time, regardless of whether it has a
schedule.
In the first of the previous examples, we set up a schedule only for full backups. However, the
scheme will still result in three backup tasks, enabling you to manually start a backup of any type:
Full backup, runs every Friday at 10:00 PM
Incremental backup, runs manually
Differential backup, runs manually
You can run any of these backup tasks by selecting it from the list of tasks in the
Backup plans and
tasks
section in the left pane.
If you have also specified the retention rules in your backup scheme, the scheme will result in four
tasks: three backup tasks and one cleanup task.
7.3.8
Archive validation
Set up the validation task to check if the backed up data is recoverable. If the backup could not pass
the validation successfully, the validation task fails and the backup plan gets the Error status.
To set up validation, specify the following parameters
1.
When to validate
– select when to perform the validation. As the validation is a resource-
intensive operation, it makes sense to
schedule
the validation to the managed machine's off-
peak period. On the other hand, if the validation is a major part of your data protection strategy
and you prefer to be immediately informed whether the backed up data is not corrupted and can
be successfully recovered, think of starting the validation right after backup creation.
2.
What to validate
– select either to validate the entire archive or the latest backup in the archive.
Validation of a file backup imitates recovery of all files from the backup to a dummy destination.
Validation of a volume backup calculates a checksum for every data block saved in the backup.
Validation of the archive will validate all the archive’s backups and may take a long time and a lot
of system resources.
