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We do not have great governance instruction in terms of recovery point/time objectives or retention periods…so when we implemented Unitrends last year, we more or less set it up to do what we did with tape only disk to disk. We have daily jobs running on two Hyper-V hosts and all the VMs on them. We also have a backup copy job taking fulls to a NAS on top of that. We struggled with space and set our retention periods to be 1 or 2 weeks on both the internal storage and the NAS copy.

Now I’m trying to understand the more sophisticated features, and I find the effect of retention settings to be a little confusing. Even though retention on the assets is set at 2 weeks max, the jobs are set to remove older backups, when I look at the sets on the backup copy target NAS, I see dates as far back as August 2018. In the backup catalog, with date filters removed, I see recovery options as far back as about 4 weeks.

I wanted to do some planning for next year’s budget to increase capacity in order to increase retention, but I already see more backups being retained than I thought were configured and I’m struggling to sort out the capacity. I understand that the idea is probably that I have my business needs well defined, I have recovery objectives and retention policies set based on governance reality, and the system is very smart and I don’t have to think so much. However, in the absence of those definitions I think I have to think so much…and I’m having trouble trying to be smarter than the system.

Can anyone enlighten me a little? Let me know if too confusing or vague. Thanks.

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Lisa - Thanks for choosing Unitrends! It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on in your environment without knowing more about your configuration, but this post in our support community may be relevant. If not, & you are current on support, let’s get you on the line with one of our support engineers to troubleshoot with you.

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Thanks Katie. I think that post did help me with my thinking. I understand better, have made some changes, and think I understand what to observe and react to differently.

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Lisa - I’m so glad that that article helped. If you ever want to chat with our engineers, and you’re current on support, please don’t hesitate to call them. They are here to help with everything from deployment through restores, and everything in between.

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Thanks Katie. We are current on support. I’ll reach out to the engineers before doing any hard budgeting.

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