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Experts out there, Have a question regarding the retention on unitrendss, hope someone give me the correct number. It has been discussed in this forum before, but still trying to figure out what number i have to put.

I understand the concept of minimum and max goal, that is, if i understood correctly , the minimum and max are not guaranteed unless you set legal hold or have enough space.

Here is what I want.

i have a incremental forever backup and want to keep 14 days of backup and delete if it is older than 14 days.

What is the numbers for minimum retention goal has to be in my case?

can the minimum goal less than legal hold 14 days ?

what is the numbers for maximum goal ? it has to be more than minimum , can that to be 15 days .

if it is 14 and 15 then Synthetic backup=minimum-max-1=14-15-1=0, Does this means that no synthetic backup will be on the system?

or if I set 14 days for minimum

and set 21 days for maximum

set legal hold 14

This will allow synthetic backup for every 6 days, but I might have backup older than 14 days since max goal 21 and have enough space .

I know that i have to set the legal hold for 14 days to make sure that 14 days backup is kept in the system, but what is the minimum and max values if i set legal hold.

6 Spice ups
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Legal hold trumps any other number and will even fill your storage if set too high. Im sure you understand that though.

Unitrends will never leave you without a full (synthetic) to restore all the incremental to so if you have a legal of 14 then your minimum will not matter (unless its more than 14) and your max will be the oldest (give or take).

Reach out to support and request to speak with a retention expert. Katie can get someone for you too if you want.

@katie

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I will add that this was explained to me by support and i played (and i learned from trial and error). Test out your theories on a non important server and fine tune it before you apply to anything important because when the backups are purged, they are gone

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Here is some good info…

How to Configure Backup Retention Settings

http://support.unitrends.com/ikm/questions.php?questionid=306

1 Spice up
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Vaira - I’m assuming that this is related to your post from a few weeks ago. Tony gave you some great advice in terms of legal hold trumping min/max settings on retention. You will need to set your legal hold minimum to 15 days, as well as your min/max fields. This should achieve your goals, but as always, you can chat, email, or call our support team for immediate response instead of having to wait on your peers to respond.

Also, you should really make time to complete our SureLearn program . These courses cover most of the questions that you’ve asked here in Spiceworks, and would allow you to support your customers in real time vs relying on Spiceworks to answer your questions.

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Good introductory info there, Tony. I’m still struggling a bit with retention as well - I’m sure I can figure it out when I’m able to apply more time to the project. So many other daily issues going on that take priority, it can be difficult to allocate the required time & resources for a pet project.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and corporate will realize the shortcomings of our current “data protection solution” and some real time/effort can be put into researching alternatives (Unitrends, Veeam, & AppAssure, in that order).

2 Spice ups
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Here is what I am going to set and wait and see what is going to happen.

Minimum=14 days

Maximum=29 days, this will allow 14-29-1=14 days for synthesize, it will allow one or two synthetic full backup.

We have enough space on the unit ,this case i am going to avoid setting the legal hold.

I do not know the answer to to the maximum goal.

Is the system is going to keep the backup for more than 29 days since the unit has enough space?

or it will purge since it reached the maximum goal?

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Vaira - The appliance will retain the data until it runs out of space, and will only give you a warning before it purges data once it’s reached it maximum data capacity. If you have a definite minimum retention period, employ the Legal Hold feature, and do not rely on the min/max settings to enforce retention. We understand that this is confusing, and are working on ways to ensure that min/max retention works the same way as Legal Hold does, but until these updates have been tested, please follow these guidelines.

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We run a backup one day in every month. i want that backup to be deleted after 30days. I set the retention as minim=30 and max=31 . But i get an alert saying that does not meet the retention since i have only one backup.

Should i set the minimum=1 and max=31?

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Vaira - Again, for this instance, it’s best if you use the Legal Hold settings instead of the min/max settings. You should set this to 30 days. Keep in mind that the appliance will not automatically delete any data until you begin to run out of space on the appliance.