Long Term Retention - Overview
Using Zerto’s data Retention to restore data, IT users are able to define a Retention Policy for their organization, where data can be retained for extended periods of time. The user is able to define the target on which the data will be kept, and for how long the data should be retained, according to the organizations regulation policy. Each VPG is equipped with its own Retention Policy.
When the user needs to restore the data, they can then select a specific point in time and perform a VPG or VM level restore.
For further details, (On-premise environments) What is Zerto’s Long Term Retention?.
What does the Repository Contain?
The Repository contains Retention sets.
How does the Long Term Retention process work?
For the first time that Long Term Retention is executed for a VPG, the whole data is being read and written to the Repository (Full Retention Set).
When the second Retention process and any subsequent ones after a full Retention of the data occurs, the Retention set consists of:
• | All the data from the initial (Full) Retention set that hasn't changed, will be pointed as a reference. |
• | The changed data set, that was updated between the first initial full Retention process to the Second one. |
Each following Incremental Retention set will accumulate the changes between the previous run and this run, to give a complete view of the data at the point in time.
What happens when the Retention Policy period is overdue?
Retention sets are kept for the Retention period specified as part of the Retention Policy configuration. Once the Retention set expires, the expired Retention sets will be deleted from the Repository as long as it has no dependencies in other Retention sets.
Before You Begin
For Long Term Retention considerations or known issues, see the Release Notes > Known Issues > Long Term Retention.