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Example Purge Schedule
Purge schedules allow you to setup the retention policy for historic versions, called revisions, of your files. You can setup multiple purge schedules for different types of files stored in different directories you are backing up data from.
Schedule Setup
The following purge schedule has been applied in this example for a file that creates a single new version once a day. This particular file could be a daily backup dump of a database or mail system. Other files may have many new revisions backed up everyday, which would change the “keep all revisions” setting of this example. For simplification, that setting is not used in this example.
Imagine today is August 10th, 2007 for this example and it is before the current day’s new file has been backed up. Since this example file has been backed up once per day between January 1st and August 9th, there would be 221 revisions of the file before the purge schedule was applied. The image below shows which file revisions would be saved using the purge schedule settings above.
The pink highlighted days show the daily revisions retained, blue shows the weekly revisions retained and orange shows the monthly revisions retained by this schedule. We have not elected to keep any revisions after the monthly retention setting of 6 months so any revisions prior to January 1st would have been purged.
After the purge schedule is applied, you now retain 16 historic revisions of the file instead of the original 221. This type of savings can greatly reduce your overall backup storage usage, especially in the case of large daily backup dump files.
Schedule Variations
All of the purge schedule time intervals and retention periods are variable so you can setup a schedule that reflects your specific retention needs. If you had selected to keep a yearly revision forever in the example above, there would be a revision retained for every December 31st available preceding the retention period shown. Also, if the file had multiple revisions per day, you could have a period setup to keep all revisions. That would result in multiple revisions retained per day for the time period you specified to retain all revisions.