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jwall04
Contributor
Contributor

Data Recovery retention policy

I am a bit confused by the vdr retention policy settings.  When making a new backup job, does the "Number of recent backups to retain" trump whatever is set below for weekly, monthly quarterly and yearly?

If today is Feb 1 and I have used 4 for monthly backups and 3 for weekly backups does that mean I will have a backup for each of the past 3 weeks (so the last day the job ran from the 2nd, 3rd and 4th week of Jan), plus just one from the past 4 months (one from the last day the job ran from Oct, Nov, Dec, and Jan)?  That would make 7 backups to choose from.  If this is correct, what if I then set the "Number of recent backups to retain" to 4, do the backups from Oct, Nov and Dec get purged?

Regards, Jeff
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DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal

The recent backups are the number of recent daily backups. vDR is just keeping pointers to the collection of blocks that would allow you to return to a particular point in time rather than a collection of individual vmdks. The ability to hold many points in time is not necessarily expensive in terms of space since the difference between any two points would only be the collection of blocks that had actually been changed.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal

I have More selected which uses

7 recent backups

8 weekly backups

6 monthly backups

4 quarterly backups

1 yearly backups

After 1 year has gone by I should have the total number or 26 points in time.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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jwall04
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks  DStavert.  Ok, that makes sense now, I wonder why they didn't just use "daily backups" instead of "recent backups".

So using the example you gave, this means I would have 26 backups per year right, not 26 total?  Assuming this is correct, if I want to restore the vm the state it was in 2.5 years after the first backup would I still require the very first backup to do this?

Regards, Jeff
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