Retention Policies in Management Console

The Cove Data Protection (Cove) Retention Policies feature in the Management Console is a way of applying enhanced retention settings to your devices as an alternative to the classic Products feature used previously. This allows you to set and manage retention centrally, removing the need for Archiving schedules in the Backup Manager.

Retention Policies requires that you are using the latest version of the Backup Manager on your devices. See Update Backup Manager for details.

The list of policies is split into two sections, New Retention Policies and Classic Policies. Classic Policies will list existing Products.

We recommend switching from Products to Retention Policies at your earliest convenience.

Retention policy rules are calculated based on the device's timezone

Cleaned Sessions

To avoid potential negative consequences when all sessions are cleaned, the last successful session (Completed, Completed With Errors, or both, if the Completed With Errors session is the last one) will always be available for restore.

Default Policy

The Retention Policies page has one pre-defined policy:

  • 30 days - where the settings are:
    • Keep all intra-daily backup sessions for 7 days
    • Keep the last backup of the day for 30 days
    • Keep the last backup of the week for 0 weeks
    • Keep the last backup of the month for 0 months
    • Keep the last backup of the year for 0 years

Example Retention Policies

Example 1

In the first example shown above, intra-daily backups are being stored for 7 days (marked by the dark blue diagonals of the last 7 days on the calendar).

The last daily backup is configured to be stored for 30 days. These are indicated by the lighter shade of blue from the 1st to 30th on the calendar.

As both the intra-daily and daily have gone past the point of retention from the 27th to the 31st of the previous month, these dates display greyed out, meaning no backups will be stored for these dates.

Example 2

In the second example shown above, the last daily backup is set to be stored for 30 days. These are the lighter shade of blue that run from the 1st to the 30th on the calendar.

The Weekly backups, indicated by the pink diagonals, are stored on Sundays for 4 weeks.

Monthly backups are set to store on the last day of the month for 6 months, and are indicated by green in the diagram above.

As the daily backups have gone past the point of retention from the 27th to the 31st of the previous month, these dates display without the lighter blue. No backups are being stored from the 27th to the 30th, as these dates are grey.

Add Custom Retention Policy

There are two ways to create a custom retention policy, either duplicate an existing policy; or by adding a new policy.

Create from duplicate

To create a new policy by duplicating an existing one:

  1. Log in to the Management Console under a SuperUser or Administrator account
  2. Navigate to Backup > Retention Policies in the left-hand vertical menu
  3. Find the policy you wish to copy and click the Duplicate button

  4. The cloned policy will open in the right-hand panel, rename it something recognizable
  5. Make any required changes to backup session retention, which can be set using:
    • Keep all intra-daily backup sessions: 1-30 days
    • Last backup session of the day: 14-365 days
    • Last backup session of the week: Up to 52 weeks
    • Last backup session of the month: Up to 36 months
    • Last backup session of the year: Up to 10 years
  6. Save all changes

Add a new policy

  1. Log in to the Management Console under a SuperUser or Administrator account
  2. Navigate to Backup > Retention Policies in the left-hand vertical menu
  3. In the top right-hand corner, click Add retention policy

  4. Select the Customer to create the retention policy for

  5. Give the policy a Name
  6. Select if the new policy is based on:
    1. None - this will use the default values
    2. Existing retention policy - select the policy from the dropdown
  7. Click Add
  8. Set the retention values as required, using:
    • Keep all intra-daily backup sessions: 1-30 days
    • Last backup session of the day: 14-365 days
    • Last backup session of the week: Up to 52 weeks
    • Last backup session of the month: Up to 36 months
    • Last backup session of the year: Up to 10 years
  9. Save all changes