Brown Dog IT

Backup Retention

When thinking about your strategy around backups, recovery, availability, and business continuity, one part of the plan tends to fall by the wayside: backup retention. We focus so much on things like recovery objectives, SLAs, and tiers of data, that our thinking revolves around the need to potentially recover the backup that we just made a matter of minutes afterwards. But there are data sets that need to be available weeks, months—even years—after they are made. And, while, your backup certainly doesn’t replace an archive (in the case of email), it does serve as a means to retain easily accessible data for extended periods of time.