Data retention considerations
An important decision in architecting backup solutions involves establishing data retention policies to govern how long backup data persists before deletion. Organizations take varied approaches to retention depending on business needs, legal factors, and budget constraints.
Many default to indefinite data retention to maximize the historical snapshots available for recovery. With no set deletion schedules, all backup data is perpetually available. This ensures confidence that even very old backup copies can be accessed if needed to restore lost production data or address a historical audit. However, indefinite retention leads to continuously expanding storage consumption and cost over time as new backups accumulate.
Other companies choose to implement limited data retention windows that automatically delete backups after a set period. Retention may be mandated by industry regulations requiring data to be kept only for a specific number of years...
