User guide

Weekly/Monthly Specifies which of the days selected in the Back up on field you want to reserve for

weekly and monthly backups. A monthly backup will be performed every fourth such

day. The default value is Friday.

Keep backups Specifies how long you want the backups to be stored in the archive. A term can be

set in hours, days, weeks, months, or years. For monthly backups, you can also select

Keep indefinitely if you want them to be saved forever.

The default values for each backup type are as follows.

Daily: 5 days (recommended minimum)

Weekly: 7 weeks

Monthly: indefinitely

The retention period for weekly backups must exceed that for daily backups; the

monthly backups' retention period must be greater than the weekly backups'

retention period.

We recommend setting a retention period of at least one week for daily backups.

Backup type Specifies the types of daily, weekly and monthly backups.

 Always full - all the daily, weekly and monthly backups will always be full. This is

the default selection for cases when a tape drive is selected as a backup location.

 Full/Differential/Incremental - daily backups are incremental, weekly backups

are differential, and monthly backups are full.

The first backup is always full. However, it is not a monthly backup. It will be

kept as a daily or a weekly backup, depending on the day of week it is created.

A backup is not deleted until all backups that directly depend on it become subject to deletion as well. This is

why you might see a backup, marked with the icon, for a few days past its expected expiration date.

Examples

Each day of the past week, each week of the past month

Let us consider a GFS backup scheme that many may find useful.

 Back up files every day, including weekends

 Be able to recover files as of any date over the past seven days

 Have access to weekly backups of the past month

 Keep monthly backups indefinitely.

Backup scheme parameters can then be set up as follows.

 Start backup at: 11:00 PM

 Back up on: All days

 Weekly/monthly: Saturday (for example)

 Keep backups:

 Daily: 1 week

 Weekly: 1 month

 Monthly: indefinitely

As a result, an archive of daily, weekly, and monthly backups will be created. Daily backups will be

available for seven days since creation. For instance, a daily backup of Sunday, January 1, will be