Techie Tuesday: Scheduling and Retention rules

We often get questions about scheduling and retention so we’re covering it off on this week’s Techie Tuesday.

Macrium Reflect provides multiple Backup Plan options to create backup cycles in days, weeks or months that allow you to pick when you want your backup definitions to run and whether they should be Full, Differential or Incremental backups. Scheduled backups can run independently of whether anyone is logged into the computer.

Macrium Reflect provides an easy 3 step approach to editing backup plans for a backup definition:

1. First, optionally select a Template from a set that includes implementations of industry best practice like Grandfather, Father, Son (GFS) or Incremental Forever
2. Add, remove or change the schedules as needed for full, differential and incremental backups
3. Finally, define Retention Rules for each type of backup. Using the Retention Rules, you can retain a specific number of each type of backup or keep them for a number of days or weeks before cleaning up.

Options define whether to apply the retention rules to all the backups in the folder, whether to run the purge before backing up, and let you define a minimum amount of disk space to retain in gigabytes (GB) before automatically deleting the oldest backup sets in the destination folder to make space available for new backups.

Our knowledge base articles cover even more about scheduling and retention.