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Dynamics Backup Retention Policies
Retention policies help you meet requirements for keeping data backed up. You can adjust retention periods and retain backups indefinitely when needed for legal procedures.
In the Options menu, you can manage your retention policies. A data retention policy is an established protocol for retaining information for operational or regulatory compliance needs.
Retention policies can be set to meet any internal requirements set by your organization for keeping data backed up.
Your backups are stored on encrypted volumes for a default number of years. Admins can edit backup retention periods as well as their frequency. The Retention feature specifies how long we retain a copy of the backup for your use. For example, for a retention policy set to six months, once a backup is six months old, we automatically purge it to ensure you remain compliant with internal data policies.
On the day after retention ends, the Own application marks the backup as deleted, and the backup appears grayed out in the Backup History list. You will no longer be able to access this backup dataset.
Attachments
Once a month, the Own application checks which attachment files are related to backups. Files that are not associated with any backup will be purged.
Retention Policy Tags on Backup History
The weekly retention policy behavior determines the best candidate for the "weekly" retention daily. Leveraging a logic that plans for the worst, the weekly retention tag will appear to migrate daily until it achieves the closest match for that week and will "set" on it.
For example, the weekly retention is set to Saturday, and today is November 2nd, 2021, a Tuesday.
In the best-case scenario, the weekly retention tag will show correctly on October 30th, 2021 - a Saturday, but will migrate on November 2nd until settling on November 7th, 2021. Suppose, for some reason, Friday was the last backup day. In that case, the Own application ensures a weekly data set will always be available next to the scenario set by the customer's retention policy, which means Friday for that week.
The retention policy will only allow automatic backups per configured plan. Meaning, if you are on the default one auto-backup a day plan and have an automatic backup scheduled for 10 AM, which runs for 2 hours, and then reconfigure the scheduler to run automatically again at 10 PM, the retention policy will delete the older backup to conform to the plan.
Edit Dynamics Retention Policies
Adjust policies to retain backups for a specific duration, after which the backups are automatically purged.
You can configure daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly frequencies, specifying how often the Own application checks and acts on the retention period policy. The frequency can be driven via a matrix to achieve specific business use case policy configurations.
- Click Edit Retention Policy.
- Select whether to Always keep last 15 backups.
- Select the Retention period from the drop-down list.
- Click Apply Policy.
- Click Update. The updates will be applied within 10 days.
