User guide

 Custom retention periods for backups of each type

Description

Let us suppose that we want to set up a backup plan that will regularly produce a series of daily (D),

weekly (W), and monthly (M) backups. Here is a natural way to do this: the following table shows a

sample two-month period for such a plan.

Jan 1—Jan 7

Jan 8—Jan 14

Jan 15—Jan 21

Jan 22—Jan 28

Jan 29—Feb 4

Feb 5—Feb 11

Feb 12—Feb 18

Feb 19—Feb 25

Feb 26—Mar 4

Daily backups run every workday except Friday, which is left for weekly and monthly backups.

Monthly backups run every fourth Friday, and weekly backups run on all other Fridays.

Parameters

You can set up the following parameters of a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme.

Start backup at

Specifies when to start a backup. The default value is 12:00 PM.

Back up on

Specifies the days on which to perform a backup. The default value is Workdays.

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.