User guide

Introduction to AppAssure 5 | 25
Retention policies enforce the periods of time in which backups are stored on short-
term (fast and expensive) media. Sometimes certain business and technical
requirements mandate extended retention of these backups, but use of fast storage
is cost prohibitive. Therefore, this requirement creates a need for long-term (slow
and cheap) storage. Businesses often use long-term storage for archiving both
compliance and non-compliance data. The archive feature supports extended
retentions for compliance and non-compliance data, as well as being used for
seeding replication data to a target core.
In AppAssure 5 retention policies can be customized to specify the length of time a
backup recovery point is maintained. As the age of the recovery points approach the
end of their retention period, they age out and are removed from the retention pool.
Typically, this process becomes inefficient and eventually fails as the amount of data
and the period of retention start growing rapidly. AppAssure 5 solves the big data
problem by managing the retention of large amounts of data with complex retention
policies and performing rollup operations for aging data using efficient metadata
operations.
Backups can be performed with an interval of a few minutes; and, these backups age
over days, months, and years. Retention policies manage the aging and deletion of
old backups. A simple waterfall method defines the aging process. The levels within
the waterfall are defined in minutes, hours, and days; weeks, months, and years. The
retention policy is enforced by the nightly rollup process.
For long term archival, AppAssure 5 lets you create an archive of the source or target
core on any removable media. The archive is internally optimized, and all data in the
archive is compressed, encrypted, and deduplicated. If the total size of the archive is
larger than the space available on the removable media, the archive will span across
multiple devices based on the available space on the media. Recovery from an
archive does not require a new core; any core can ingest the archive and recover
data if the administrator has the passphrase and the encryption keys.
Figure 3. Retention Policy