Configuring rules for long-term data retention

You can configure policies, called retention rules, to comply with government, industry, and business requirements for the long-term retention and eventual deletion of data.

About this task

Retention rules help you to meet requirements for the ongoing collection of data for long-term retention. When you create a retention rule, you specify which clients are to have their active backup data collected, how often the data is collected, and how long the data is retained.

According to the data-collection frequency that you specify in a retention rule, a retention set creation job runs to collect the active backup data for the specified clients. The retention set is a point-in-time snapshot of the active backup data objects for the specified clients.

The backup data objects that the retention set contains are the original backup objects that are already in server storage from earlier backup operations. These data objects are tracked in the server inventory to ensure that the data is retained according to the retention set's own expiration date, which is independent of policy set specifications for data retention. This data object might be eligible for deletion based on its backup policy, but expiration processing does not delete it if it is part of an unexpired retention set.
Important: A backup data object might be in multiple retention sets, but it is always the original backup data object and not a copy of the data object.

You can manage retention rules by using the command line interface or by using the Operations Center.

Procedure

  1. To view the retention rules that are defined to hub or spoke servers in the Operations Center, open the Retention Rules page. On the Operations Center menu bar, click Services > Retention Rules.
  2. To define a retention rule for long-term data retention, follow the instructions in Defining a retention rule for long-term data retention.