Retention Policies

Cloud-native snapshots, snapshot replicas and image-level backups are not kept forever. They are removed according to retention policy specified in the backup schedule settings while creating a backup policy.

Depending on the data protection scenario, retention policy can be specified:

In restore points — for cloud-native snapshots and snapshot replicas.

The snapshot chain can contain only the allowed number of restore points. If the number of allowed restore points is exceeded, Veeam Backup for AWS removes the earliest restore point from the snapshot chain. For details, see EC2 Backup Retention and RDS Backup Retention.

In days/months/years — for backups and archives.

Restore points in the backup chain (either standard or archive) can be stored for the allowed period of time. If a restore point is older than the specified limit, Veeam Backup for AWS removes it from the backup chain. For details, see sections EC2 Backup Retention, RDS Backup Retention, DynamoDB Backup Retention, EFS Backup Retention and VPC Configuration Backup Retention.

Note

When configuring policy scheduling, consider that Veeam Backup for AWS runs retention sessions at 4:00 AM by default, according to the time zone set on the backup appliance. If you schedule backup policies to execute at 4:00 AM, the backup policies and retention tasks will be queued.

You can also specify global retention settings for obsolete snapshots and replicas. For details, see Configuring Global Retention Settings.