Real-time Backup Version Retention
Overview
Backup Frequency is the setting that determines how often CrashPlan backs up to your destinations. If you are using the free version of CrashPlan, you can back up as often as once a day.
Real-time backup (for Crashplan+ users), reflects CrashPlan's ability to back up as often as once a minute.
Version retention is the ability to specify the rules for removing from your backup archive the versions of files that you no longer care about. Removing these no longer relevant versions can play a big role in managing the size of your backup archive. In CrashPlan, version retention means keeping more of your more recent versions and less of the older ones.
CrashPlan uses a “distributed risk” model, meaning that your risk is distributed over time, rather concentrating risk over a flurry of activity or requiring you to keep an unnecessarily large backup that retains all versions indefinitely.
Archive Maintenance
Archive maintenance cleans up a backup archive to remove backed up data according to the retention settings you've specified. Archive maintenance removes:
- File versions that are too old
- Deleted files that no longer need to be kept
- Files that are no longer selected for backup
Archive maintenance takes place according to a schedule specified at the destination or when you click the Compact button for that destination.
Benefits
CrashPlan backup frequency and version retention options provide the following benefits:
- Determine how often files are backed up (as often as once day.)
- Keep versions based on the age of the files.
- CrashPlan+ customers only:
- Specify how often files are backed up (as often as once a minute.)
- Determine how long backed up files are available for restoring.
- Balance length of retention against the size of your back up archive.
- Minimize the amount of space archives consume at the backup destination by removing the data that no longer needs to be in the backup archive.
- Set the rules for keeping versions over a specific periods of time in accordance to your retention policies, or keep all versions indefinitely. Users of the free version of CrashPlan cannot change the default retention settings.