Retention period
Learn here about the retention periods that are defined by the server plan for your backup data.
For each server plan, the retention periods of the backup data are already preconfigured.
Therefore, as a user, you do not need to specify these time windows yourself after you have assigned your client to a server plan. You can see which retention periods apply to the data of your client (or the server plan to which your client is assigned) in the Command Center under https://console1.dasi.rwth-aachen.de/.
To do this, navigate to Manage > Plans > Backup destination and click Primary.
The “retention period” is the minimum number of days that all backup jobs must be retained. The number of days must be exceeded before the data is eligible for aging.
A typical backup cycle consists of daily incremental backups that are retained for 30 days. After this period, they are automatically combined into a synthetic full backup. The synthetic full backups created in this way are generated on a monthly basis and retained for six months. This eliminates the need to manually trigger weekly or monthly backups – retention and consolidation are performed automatically according to the defined retention rules.
A distinction is made between the “basic retention period” and the “extended retention rules.”
- If the basic retention period is set to one week, this means that a basic retention period of one week applies to every backup job assigned to this plan.
- In addition, extended retention rules are defined. Here, the retention periods for specific full backups are extended on the basis of full backups.
- The example in our screenshot shows that a retention period of one month applies to weekly full backups and a retention period of six months applies to monthly full backups. This results in a retention period of six months.
Consequently, systems that have not performed a backup for more than six months are deleted in favor of load balancing and performance. This is done by the system. This corresponds to the retention periods defined in the server plans. Systems are first “retired” and ultimately deleted. Clients marked as “retired” are usually deleted from the system within a few hours to 14 days after the retention period has expired.
Please note:
The currently available server plans ServerplanD and ServerplanE (as of 08.08.2025) include a retention period of 1 month for daily (incremental) backups and 6 months for monthly backups (full and synthetic full backups). The adjustments to the server plans regarding the frequency of synthetic backups are made to reduce the load on the clients and to reduce read operations on the underlying storage.
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