Retention Policy

Short-term Retention

Retention policy defines the number of restore points or number of days to keep your backup data. Specify the restore points/days Vinchin Backup & Recovery will purge the obsolete points/days from backup storage, keep the latest restore points/days.

• Full backup job: Each full restore point is independent , for the backup jobs with full backup schedules only, when retention policy has been triggered, Vinchin Backup server will delete the older backup restore points directly to comply with the retention policy.

• Differential backup job: Each differential restore point depends on the previous full restore point. When retention policy has been triggered, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will start deleting the earliest differential restore points, when all the differential restore points between the first and the second full restore points had been deleted, and when retention policy has been triggered for the next time, the first full restore point will be deleted.

• Incremental backup job: When the retention policy of an incremental backup job has been triggered, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will try to merge the first incremental restore point with the full restore point on the first backup chain, the full restore point will step forward and the first incremental restore point will be gone. It will run the same process until all incremental restore points had been merged with the first full restore point.

  After that when the retention policy had been triggered for the next time, the first full restore point will be deleted, and then the second backup chain becomes the first and the restore point merging process goes on the same way

• Forever incremental backup job: Different from incremental backup, forever incremental backup will only create one backup chain for each VM included in the job, when retention policy has been triggered, Vinchin Backup & Recovery will merge the first incremental restore point with the only full restore point at the beginning of the backup chain, and the timestamp of the full restore point will keep stepping forward each time when the incremental restore point had been merged.

Warning

If you select Retention Mode as Number of Days, please be cautious of while Vinchin Backup & Recovery have been powered off for several days (over retention days), retention policy will trigger while you start Vinchin Backup & Recovery. The data will be expired and deleted.

Long-term (GFS) Retention

GFS retention, also as known as Grandfather-Father-Son retention. It is a long-term data retention policy which allows you to retain your VM backups for longer period of time using a minimal amount of storage resource.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery implemented GFS retention to retain the following backups for different periods of time respectively:

• Weekly full backup

• Monthly full backup

• Yearly full backup

For the weekly full backup, you can specify a day of the week on which the full backup is supposed to be created, and specify for how long (how many weeks) to be retained. Then Vinchin Backup & Recovery will start to wait and tag (with a "W" tag) the first coming full backup of the week. The tagged full backup will be retained for the specified number of weeks, and the general short-term retention policy will not purge the tagged weekly full backup until the tag is expired. As for the monthly (with a "M" tag) and yearly (with a "Y" tag) full backups, GFS retention works the same way.

GFS retention policy can be configured during the VM backup job creation process, when the job started to run regularly according to its schedule. The specific backups will also be tagged automatically as per your configurations. The tagged full backups (restore points) can be seen on the VM Backup > Backup Data page, the tags can be added or removed manually on the same page if needed, but GFS retention only works with full backups (full restore points).

GFS retention works independently with the general short-term retention policy, so you can implement both general and GFS retention policies in a VM backup job. Additionally, for some specific backups, you can manually tag (with a "F" tag) them with the forever retention tag to keep them in the backup storage permanently.