Insight to retention policy.

[shafeeq]

Hi Team,
I am really embarrassed with retention policy of VBO. Whatever I've understand is not like traditional backup retention policy.
If item level retention with 'keep forever' is selected, How the backup job works, first full backup and subsequent incremental/differential? What happens when an item is hard deleted from the source? will that be deleted from the backup repo also?

If snapshot level retention; is that incremental/differential or each snapshot is the full copy of the current state? How the retention period is applied in the snapshot? Against the backup copy in the repository or like in the item level retention, is it based on the created/modified date of the source item.

Please guide!

[Mike Resseler]

Hey Shafeeq,

If item-level with keep forever is selected, then indeed we will take a full backup of everything (simply because all items will fall into the keep forever retention) and afterwards it will be always incremental, with only the new/ changed items protected.
If an item is deleted from the source, it is kept in the backup until the retention is over, which is in this case forever

Snapshot level: We take a backup of the current state first (so full backup). After that, we only do incrementals, so again changed and new items. Retention on that level means that we remove the state after X time (the retention). However, the other states (Today, yesterday, ... -N days) will be kept in the repository, so you will always be able to restore to a specific point in time.

Makes sense?

[shafeeq]

Hey Mike, Thanks for the explanation. Let me make it clearer for me
We need to backup everything from the Sharepoint site irrespective of the date created/modified and the backup should be retained for X number of days and an item or even the whole site can be restored to a point in time. So with Snapshot level retention, if we select 1-year retention, VBO will backup everything irrespective of the date created/modified and will remove the state after 1 year. Am I Correct?

[nielsengelen]

Correct, snapshot level is the way to go then.