When I started to use Azure Backup with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials integration a number of years ago, Azure Backup was limited to 30 days retention but I knew that this had been increased of late so using the Microsoft Azure Backup client on my server, I looked to see what the maximum value was that I could set the backup job retention to and the number that came out was 3360 Days which in a sensible scale is 9 Years and 3 Months.
This is a very short and quick post but something I wanted to share none-the-less.
I got a call from somebody today looking at the potential for using Azure as a long-term solution to store infrequently accessed data. A StorSimple appliance is one obvious answer to the problem but that was out of consideration in this instance and we talked about using Azure Backup as a solution due to the fact that this data doesn’t actually need to be accessible online and an offline recovery to access the data would be viable.
When I started to use Azure Backup with the Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials integration a number of years ago, Azure Backup was limited to 30 days retention but I knew that this had been increased of late so using the Microsoft Azure Backup client on my server, I looked to see what the maximum value was that I could set the backup job retention to and the number that came out was 3360 Days which in a sensible scale is 9 Years and 3 Months.
That’s quite a lot of retention there but sadly, it still wasn’t enough for this requirement so back to the drawing board. My problem aside, it’s good to see that Azure Backup now supports long-term data retention for backup and 9 years and 3 months is long enough to meet most organisations retention requirements including those in the financial sector.