DL4300 Appliance
Managing retention policies
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NOTE:
You can monitor the status and progress of the export by viewing the Virtual Standby or
Events pages.
Parent topic
Managing aging data
This section describes how to manage aging snapshot data saved to your repository. It includes information about
retaining recovery points in your repository, retention policies, and the resulting process of rolling up recovery
points to conserve space. It describes the new ability to relocate recovery points from your repository to a Dell DR
backup and deduplication appliance.
This section also describes how to archive data for long-term storage that is not subject to rollup, and how to
access recovery points that have been archived.
Parent topic
About Rapid Recovery data retention and archiving
Each time your Core captures a snapshot, the data is saved as a recovery point to your repository. Recovery
points naturally accumulate over time. The Core uses a retention policy to determine how long snapshot data
is retained in the repository. During the rollup portion of the nightly job, the Core enforces the retention policy to
reduce the amount of storage space consumed. During rollup, the date of each recovery point is compared to the
date of the most recent recovery point. The Core then combines or "rolls up" older recovery points. Over time,
older recovery points are eventually replaced with newer ones as the oldest recovery points "age out" beyond the
oldest retention period.
To keep recovery points that would otherwise be combined and eventually deleted, you can create an archive
from the Core Console. An archive is a file containing the full set of recovery points for machines protected on
your Core at the point in time in which it was created.
You can store an archive in a file system, or on a storage account in the cloud.
If you need to access the data in a recovery point, you can later attach (for Rapid Recovery 6.x and later) or
import the archive, restoring those recovery points to your repository. You can then take the same actions on that
data as with any other recovery points currently in your Core.
NOTE:
Since the Core recognizes the original dates of recovery points in an archive, imported recovery
points may again be rolled up or deleted during the next nightly job period. If you want to retain older
recovery points, you can disable rollup for the relevant machines, or you can extend the retention period.
Parent topic
Managing retention policies
A retention policy is a set of rules that dictates the length of time for the Core to retain recovery points before
starting to roll them up. Retention policies can be set to roll up based on hours, days, weeks, months and years.
You can set up to six rules (the default policy sets five rules).
Since you can back up as frequently as every 5 minutes, the first rule in the retention policy typically sets how
long to retain all recovery points. For example, if you back up a machine every quarter hour, 96 recovery points
are saved to the repository for that machine per day, until rollup begins. Without managing your retention policy,
that amount of data can quickly fill a repository.
