BackupEDGE 3.x Release Notes

Backup Time To Live (Data Retention) Notes

In BackupEDGE 3.x, there are no longer ‘slotnames’ to differentiate backups on media that support more than one backup at a time (e.g., NAS). Instead, each backup is now given a Retention Time (or Time To Live value) that specifies how long BackupEDGE must wait until reclaiming this backup. If you attempt to overwrite a backup that has not yet expired, then an error will be generated. Note that you may manually delete such backups via EDGEMENU, but BackupEDGE will not automatically do so.

After a backup has reached its time to live, or expiration time, then BackupEDGE may delete it automatically to make space for new backups. Exactly when it does so depends on the particular type of medium. For example, since tapes do not permit random rewriting, BackupEDGE cannot erase an expired archive until all archives that are stored after it on the tape have also expired. In contrast, backups stored on other storage types may be erased at any time after they have expired. BackupEDGE will do this as needed.

In general, this makes the task of data management much easier. When setting up a scheduled job, by default, backups will be kept for seven days. This may be changed on the ‘Notify / Advanced’ page of the scheduling screen in EDGEMENU.

Backup Retention Times (TTL) are settable per-Triplet in BackupEDGE 03.00.02 and later.

Backups will be able to be deleted manually by using the EDGEMENU delete option regardless of the Backup Retention Time.

One side-effect of this involves NAS / FTP / FSP / AWS and S3CLOUD resources: by default, BackupEDGE will only reclaim backups on these devices when it runs out of space. You must therefore provide the total space that BackupEDGE may use in the Quota (K) field of these resources. Note that an alternative approach would be to aggressively delete expired backups from these resources, rather than doing so only when necessary. This is also supported beginning with 03.01.01.

SharpDrive™ Resources automatically set the Quota as the total size of the filesystem created during initialization.

Last Updated - 2016/02/24