Backup policies are rules that define the schedule for automatic backups, the retention period, and other advanced backup settings. After you configure servers for backup, the data from these servers is backed up and retained according to the backup policy. A File server can have one or more backup sets, which can be independently configured, backed up, and restored.

A backup policy for a File server defines the following:

📝 Note

​ Druva creates a default backup policy for your setup. The default backup policy is configured to back up all file types. You can assign the default backup policy to one or more backup sets. You can also update or delete this backup policy.

📝 Note
​
​ The backup schedule that you define in a backup policy depends on your organization's policies.

Retention defines the rules for retaining your backups (recovery point) within the storage. Use the retention period to define the duration for which you want to retain your historical backups.

The objective of retention is to keep important data for future access, depending on how critical it is. Retention also ensures that backups that are no longer required are cleaned from your storage periodically, resulting in less storage utilization and costs.

❗ Important

The retention period would not be honored for the most recent recovery point when a server or VM or backup set is disabled. This allows you to restore the latest recovery point later if required.

Retention should consider the value of your data and the compliance requirements. The different types of data will be retained for different durations. For example, a bank's retention period for customers' financial records is different from facilities inventory records.

The main factors to consider while defining a retention period are:

Druva follows the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) retention model wherein, in case of an overlap, the retention setting of the longer period (Son-Father-Grandfather relation) is considered. The recovery point is expired as per the settings of the higher period. For example, in case there is an overlap between the daily and weekly retention period, the weekly retention period is considered. So daily is the smallest unit and weekly overrides daily > monthly overrides weekly > yearly overrides monthly.

Also, Druva follows the Gregorian calendar for tracking days.

While backup schedules are configured on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis the last recovery point created by the backups on that particular day will be retained as per the retention setting.

You can define the following durations to retain recovery points.

The recovery point name displayed on the Management Console is recovery point creation time as per the server time zone, on which the backup occurred. Druva considers the time zone of the server for retaining the recovery points as per the retention setting.

If you are registering the server under default organization, Druva provides a default backup policy with the following retention settings:

📝 Note

​ The above default retention settings are applicable for Warm storage and Long Term Retention (LTR) tiers.

The following diagram illustrates the recovery points that will be available on a given day ( Feb 9 in this example) based on the retention settings you have configured. In this example the policy is created and backups start on Dec 30 of the previous year.

On 9 Feb you will have 17 recovery points or recovery points to restore as described in the table.

📝 Note

​Daily is the smallest unit and weekly overrides daily and monthly overrides weekly and yearly overrides monthly.

Recovery points resulting from

In continuation with the example above, so let us say malware was detected on 9 Feb evening. After investigation, it was discovered that the data till 7 Feb is corrupted. In that case, the recovery point available to you will be of 6 Feb which is available due to the daily recovery point. However, there could be a data loss of data backed between 7 Feb and 9 Feb.
​

a

Before adding a backup policy for File servers, ensure you have read:

​

To create multiple copies of a backup policy without having to create a backup policy each time, you can create a copy of an existing backup policy.

When you create a copy of a backup policy, the newly-created backup policy is identical to the policy that it was copied from. You can modify the properties of this backup policy according to your requirements.

To copy a file server backup policy

📝 Note
​ The Selected backup policy field displays the name of the backup policy that you selected to copy .

If you are a cloud-derived administrator or a group-derived administrator, you can update the retention period of the existing backup policies. While updating a retention period, you can specify the duration for which you want Druva to retain daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recovery points. The changes made to the existing retention period get applied to the existing and the new recovery points created after updating the retention period.

To update a retention period

If you are a cloud-derived administrator or a group-derived administrator, you can update the pre-backup and post-backup script settings of the existing backup policies.

While updating the backup script settings of a backup policy, you can specify the location of pre and post backup scripts for execution for Windows and Linux servers. Additionally, you can also configure the setting to skip a backup, if the backup pre-script is unavailable at the specified location.

Procedure

If you are a cloud-derived or a group-derived administrator, you can remove backup policies that are not assigned to servers. Before you remove a backup policy, ensure that you assign a new backup policy to the server.

📝 Note
​
​ You can delete a backup policy only after 7 days of the deletion of the last backup set mapped to the policy.

Procedure