A data retention policy is an established protocol for retaining information for operational or regulatory compliance needs.
Our retention policies vary depending on your pricing plan. Retention policies can be set to meet any internal requirements set by your organization for keeping data backed up.
Your backups are stored on encrypted volumes for a default duration number of years.
Admins can edit backup retention periods as well as their frequency. The Retention feature specifies how long we retain a copy of the backup for your use. For example, for a retention policy set to six months, once a backup is six months old, we automatically purge it to ensure you remain compliant with internal data policies.
On the day after retention ends, we mark the backup as deleted, and the backup appears grayed out in the Backup History list. You will no longer be able to access this backup dataset.
Configure daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly frequencies, specifying how often we check and acts on the retention period policy. The frequency is configurable to achieve specific business use cases.
Once a month, we check which attachment files are related to backups. Files that are not associated with any backup will be purged.
The weekly retention policy label behavior determines the best candidate for the "weekly" retention daily. Leveraging a logic that plans for the worst, the weekly retention label will appear to migrate daily until it achieves the closest match for that week and will "set" on it.
For example, the weekly retention is set to Saturday, and today is November 2nd, 2021, a Tuesday.
In the best-case scenario, the weekly retention label will show correctly on October 30th, 2021 - a Saturday but will migrate on November 2nd until settling on November 7th, 2021. Suppose, for some reason, Friday was the last backup day. In that case, we ensure a weekly data set will always be available next to the scenario set by the customer's retention policy, which meant Friday for that week.
The retention policy will only allow automatic backups per configured plan. Meaning, if you are on the default one auto-backup a day plan and have an automatic backup scheduled for 10 AM, which runs for 2 hours, and then reconfigure the scheduler to run automatically again at 10 PM, the retention policy will delete the older backup to conform to the plan.