Specifications

Related Articles
Understanding Retention Policies
How to Create Retention Policies
Retention Policy Example
Understanding Barracuda Offsite Vaulting
(firmware version 5.4 and higher only)
Use retention policies to define the length of time you retain historic data based on daily, weekly, monthly, or
annual time intervals. This allows you to manage data storage and growth.
Use the Barracuda Backup web interface to verify retention policies are in place and enforced. You can create different retention policies for
different sets of data including:
Files
Data backed up by the Barracuda Backup Agent (Exchange, SQL, system state)
Email messages
How it Works
Data is retained based on a traditional grandfather-father-son (daily-weekly-monthly) rotation model. You specify how long to keep daily, weekly,
monthly, and yearly backups through data retention policies.
When you define a retention policy, begin by selecting either a preset template or a previously defined policy as a starting point. This helps you
avoid creating multiple retention policies for the same sets of data. You can create one policy for all of the computers and data sources on a
Barracuda Backup Server, or create different policies that include subsets of the data.
Revision Timelines
Historic data is retained based on your revision timeline settings.
Depending on how your data is backed up, revision timelines are treated in the following manner:
Data backed up using the Barracuda Backup Agent treats Sunday as the end of week in accordance with the ISO date standard.
Data backed up using a NAS protocol considers weeks as 7 day periods beginning each month, and requires a separate timeline for
removed data.
Retention policies are based on retaining different types of data and different revisions for different periods of time. For example, in the General
Documents Revision Template in the table below, all revisions are kept based on daily, weekly, and monthly revisions.
The predefined timeline templates use the revision timelines defined in the following table.
Revision Template Keep All Revisions Keep Daily
Revisions
Keep Weekly
Revisions
Keep Monthly
Revisions
Keep Yearly
Revisions
General Documents 5 days 1 week 1 month 1 year never
Dump Files Never 1 week 1 month 3 months Never
Financial Data 10 days 2 weeks 2 months 18 months 6 years
Keep No Historic
Data
Never Never Never Never Never
Exchange Data Never 2 weeks Never Never Never
Important
Before defining data retention policies, make sure you have a clear understanding of data and email message compliance rules as well
as your organization's record retention policies.
Important
Purging applies to your current data is never impacted by a retention policy.historic file revisions only;