Retention Policies

Cloud-native snapshots and image-level backups created by backup policies are not kept forever — they are removed according to retention policy settings specified while creating the policies as described in sections Creating VM Policies, Creating SQL Policies and Creating Spanner Policies.

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

In restore points — for cloud-native snapshots.

The snapshot chain can contain only the allowed number of restore points. If the number of allowed restore points is exceeded, Veeam Backup for Google Cloud removes the earliest restore point from the snapshot chain. For more information, see VM Snapshot Retention, SQL Snapshot Retention and Spanner Snapshot Retention.

In days/months/years — for image-level backups.

Restore points in the backup chain (either regular or archive) can be stored in the configuration database only for the allowed period of time. If a restore point is older than the specified time limit, Veeam Backup for Google Cloud removes it from the backup chain. For more information, see sections VM Backup Retention, SQL Backup Retention and Spanner Backup Retention.

You can also specify retention settings for snapshots that become obsolete. For more information, see Configuring Global Retention Settings.