Description, Parameters – Acronis Backup for Windows Server - User Guide User Manual

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Custom retention periods for backups of each type

Description

Let us suppose that we want to set up a backup plan that will regularly produce a series of daily (D),
weekly (W), and monthly (M) backups. Here is a natural way to do this: the following table shows a
sample two-month period for such a plan.

Jan 1—Jan 7

Jan 8—Jan 14

Jan 15—Jan 21

Jan 22—Jan 28

Jan 29—Feb 4

Feb 5—Feb 11

Feb 12—Feb 18

Feb 19—Feb 25

Feb 26—Mar 4

Daily backups run every workday except Friday, which is left for weekly and monthly backups.
Monthly backups run on the last Friday of each month, and weekly backups run on all other Fridays.
As a result, you will normally obtain 12 monthly backups over a full year.

Parameters

You can set up the following parameters of a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) scheme.

Start backup at

Specifies when to start a backup. The default value is 12:00 PM.

Back up on

Specifies the days of the week when a backup will be performed. The default value is
Workdays.

Weekly/Monthly

Specifies which day of the week (out of the days selected in the Back up on field) you
want to reserve for weekly and monthly backups.

The default value is Friday. With this value, a monthly backup will run on the last
Friday of each month. Weekly backups will run on all other Fridays. If you choose a
different day of week, these rules will apply to the day chosen.

Keep backups

Specifies how long you want the backups to be stored in the archive. A term can be
set in hours, days, weeks, months, or years. For monthly backups, you can also select
Keep indefinitely if you want them to be saved forever.

The default values for each backup type are as follows.

Daily: 5 days (recommended minimum)

Weekly: 7 weeks

Monthly: indefinitely

The retention period for weekly backups must exceed that for daily backups; the
monthly backups' retention period must be greater than the weekly backups'
retention period.

We recommend setting a retention period of at least one week for daily backups.