Working with retention rules
About retention rules
Retention allows you to implement granularity (specific pattern retention) in your backed up generations. For example, you might want to retain all generations of the previous day, then 1 generation each day for a week, 1 generation each week for a month, 1 generation each month for a year, and 1 generation each year for the next 10 years.
Retention rules are optional. If you do not use the retention feature, your backup data will remain online according to the settings for backup set generation (the oldest generation of a file will be overwritten when the maximum number of generations is reached).
After assigning a retention rule to an individual backup set, you need to enforce the rule either on demand or on a schedule. When a retention rule is enforced, the online data that does not qualify for retention is deleted. If options within a retention rule overlap, the DS-Client software will only apply options that retain more data.
The following sections describe how to work with retention rules.
IMPORTANT: Since this feature deals with the removal of backed up data, you must be very careful when you define retention rules. Retention is a process that will delete everything except what is specified for retention.
More information is available in the following Knowledge Base articles: