Managing Backups Using a Retention Policy v2.6

Over the course of time when using BART, the number of backups can grow significantly. This ultimately leads to a large consumption of disk space unless an administrator periodically performs the process of deleting the oldest backups that are no longer needed. This process of determining when a backup is old enough to be deleted and then actually deleting such backups can be done and automated with the following basic steps:

1. Determine and set a retention policy in the BART configuration file. A retention policy is a rule that determines when a backup is considered obsolete. The retention policy can be applied globally to all servers, but each server can override the global retention policy with its own.

2. Use the MANAGE subcommand to categorize and manage backups according to the retention policy.

3. Create a cron job to periodically run the MANAGE subcommand to evaluate the backups and then list and/or delete the obsolete backups.

   Retention policy management applies differently to incremental backups than to full backups. See Managing Incremental Backups for information about how retention policy management is applied to each backup type.

   The following sections describe how retention policy management generally applies to backups, and its specific usage and effect on full backups.