You have protection plans running, the check-up report configured, and your backup configuration is being stored in a safe location in the event your backup server needs to be rebuilt. What’s the next step to insure to the efficiency of your backup process?
Set Expiration Policy and Create Expire and Purge Store Tasks
The expiration and purge store tasks should be configured to meet the restore point objectives of your organization. The first step is to set the expiration policy. This is done at the store level in the expiration tab of the store properties. Initially retention of restore points is set to “Infinite”, the default setting. For most organizations restore points can be “thinned-out” over time. DATASTOR provides a very flexible tool for this purpose. Each recovery point (usually a daily backup) is set to be retained for a certain number of days. The last recovery point of each week is then set to be retained for a certain number of weeks. The same procedure is followed to set retention of the last recovery point of each month, quarter and year. Restore points that don’t meet the retention criteria are sent to the store Recycle Bin when an expire task is run. However they are not completely deleted and they are not seen in the Restore calendar as a potential restore point. Items in the Recycle Bin can still be moved back to the store archive. To implement the expiration policy, an Expire Task is created at the store level using the “Create Store Task” action. When the expiration task runs the expired items are moved to the Recycle Bin. This task is generally scheduled to run before a Purge Task.
The final step is to create a Purge Task that permanently removes expired recovery points from the Recycle Bin and recovers disk space. Like the Expire Task this task is set using the “Create Store Task” action. For a technical summary of the Expire and Purge Tasks click here. Step-by-step instructions can be found within the help tool of the application. From the main page select Help > Help Topics. In the Search bar type “Store Task” and click “List Topics”. Highlight “Store Tasks” from the listed topics and then click “Display”.
Configure Store Verify Tasks
Protecting and insuring the integrity of your data has always been a top priority at DATASTOR but the new verification tools in the R9.0 release provide added assurance of data integrity and completeness. The new verify tools are integrated with other store tasks (purge and copy) and when properly implemented the performance of these tasks can be significantly improved. For example, Purge Tasks can run up to 10 times faster and Copy Tasks up to four times faster when implemented using Best Practices. A detailed summary of the re-engineered Verify Task was posted here when our May 2016 Newsletter was released. For implementation details and Best Practice guidelines please reference our Knowledge Base Article on our Support Portal.