Retention Policy

Retention policy defines the number of restore points to keep on your performance extents and is configured at the Specify Backup Storage Settings step of the New Backup Job wizard.

You can manage retention policies to remove obsolete restore points both from the performance extents and the capacity tier.

The restore points that fall under the retention policy will be removed both from the performance and capacity extents in the following manner:

• An earliest restore point will be removed from the backup chain on the associated extent.
• Data blocks that correspond to the restore point that is being removed will be purged from the capacity extent upon the next offload or copy session.

Make sure that the capacity extent has not been put into the maintenance mode, as this mode prevents synchronization of the state of the backup chain in the performance tier with that of the capacity tier.

For more information about the move and copy offload sessions, see Moving Inactive Backup Chains to Capacity Tier and  Copying Backups to Capacity Tier respectively.

• Immutable blocks of data are removed after the immutability period is over.

When a retention policy encounters immutable copied/moved blocks of data, it removes such blocks from the associated backup files on the extents only and then updates indexes, informing Veeam Backup & Replication that these blocks no longer exist and must be removed from the capacity tier once mutable.

For more information about immutability, see Immutability.

• Associated indexes will be updated for consistency purposes.

For more information, see Indexes.

Related Topics

• Short-Term Retention Policy
• Switching to Maintenance Mode