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About retention control

A data retention policy is determined by an organization's legal and business data retention requirements. You may need to keep data available for months or even years. How you achieve this may be a combination of on-system retention and archiving to removable media for longer term storage.

Space on the system is self-managed based on the user settings for balancing ingest rate and retention (see Balancing backup performance and retention). When your system capacity is full, the oldest backups are purged to make room for newer ones. However, the Unitrends system will not purge the latest backups of any type for a given client, or any backups for a client that are put on legal hold. The greater the difference in the amount of total data protected and the system size, the greater the on-system retention. If the difference is small you will see less retention on the system. If you require many weeks of on-system retention, you must deploy a system of sufficient size.

The retention control feature allows you to decide how long backups are retained on the system before being purged. Controlling the order in which backups are removed allows for more effective management of available space, without affecting the manner in which general performance is balanced with retention.

The Retention tool tracks backups as groups containing a master or full backup, along with any incrementals or differentials that followed. A master in a file-based backup group may be generated on-demand, by a scheduled backup, or synthesized by the system during an incremental forever process.

No retention policy is set for newly added clients. With no retention policy set, backups for a client are kept as long as possible by a system until the system runs out of backup space, at which point the oldest backups are purged. Retention policies are set using the following controls. You must have Manage privileges or higher to change retention settings.

See these topics for details on setting retention: