Retention Current Best Practices

[rjiupat]

Currently we are doing a standard GFS type retention on all our backups, keeping two yearlies. It looks like there will be a new policy to keep certain data only 6 months, including backups. My question is, if you are doing this type of more restrictive retention, are you running multiple jobs with the longer-retention jobs excluding the shorter-retention data? Are there any guidelines you could point me to, or tips on how you're dealing with this? Thanks in advance!

[Mildur]

Hi rjiupat

I recommend to create jobs based on the required retention and only include the VMs (or vSphere VM tags) you want to backup by this retention.
Since V12 you can move those "6 month" VMs from the old backup job to a new backup job with the 6 month of retention. That way you don't have to start a new backup chain.
User guide: How Moving to Another Job Works

If it's about backup copy jobs, it gets a little bit more complex. Copy jobs always included the entire backup job. You can exclude some VMs, but I would still use two different backup jobs and backup copy jobs with different retentions.

Best,
Fabian