❗ Important

The availability of this feature is limited based on the license type, region, and other criteria. To access this feature, contact your Account Manager or Support. This article/documentation is subject to change based on the continuous improvements to this feature.

The Enable Long Term Retention (LTR) option is available only for the backup policies with the LTR-eligible retention period.

📝 Note
​In the case of Hyper-V and VMware, when you enable LTR for a backup policy, the file-level restore on cold recovery points is not supported.

Suppose you have enabled the LTR on a backup policy, and based on this backup policy, your data is moved to the cold tier. Upon disabling LTR, data will stop getting transferred to the cold tier. However, your existing data in the cold tier will remain in the cold tier until it expires.

This article describes the procedure to enable Long Term Retention (LTR), monitor your savings via LTR, and restore the cold recovery points from the cold tier. You will also find information on the deletion of cold recovery points and the early delete fees. We recommend that you read About Long Term Retention before proceeding to read this article.

Let's begin.

To begin with, examine if the retention period you’ve set in your backup policy qualifies for LTR.

To enable LTR, you need at least one year of retention for any recovery point. Examples of retention periods that are eligible for LTR are as follows.

However, the following is not a valid retention period:

Based on your retention, whether or not your backup policy is eligible for LTR can be seen on the Create New Backup Policy page.
The following screenshot shows that the Enable Long Term Retention (LTR) option is disabled for this backup policy as the retention period is less than one year.

However, if your retention period is greater than or equal to one year, you are eligible to enable LTR as shown in the following screenshot:

To enable LTR, ensure that the daily recovery points days must be less than the Warm recovery point threshold that you select.
The following screenshot shows that the daily recovery point limit exceeds the warm recovery point threshold.​

When creating a new backup policy for Windows/Linux Servers and NAS workloads, you can duplicate an existing backup policy as a template. All your existing settings are automatically added to the new backup policy. You can save time and reduce errors in creating a new backup policy.

📝 Note
​ You cannot duplicate your old backup policies where the daily retention period exceeds the warm recovery point threshold. In the new LTR V2 the daily retention period must be less than the Warm Recovery pointthreshold.

You can enable LTR either when creating a new backup policy or when editing an existing backup policy later.

📝 Note
​ Long Term Retention (LTR) is available for Cloud and Druva GovCloud. However, it is currently not available for AWS Marketplace customers.

📝 Note
​Any change in retention will apply to all existing and new recovery points.

On the backup policy details page, you can see the status of LTR as shown in the following screenshots:

📝 Note
​When LTR is enabled, you can also view the number of days selected for retaining the recovery point in the warm tier.

On the Backup Policies page, the Storage Tier column displays the storage tier selected (Warm or LTR) for data backup of each backup policy.

📝 Note
​ In the case of Hyper-V and VMware,when LTR is enabled for a backup policy, file-level restore on cold recovery points is not supported.

You can change the number of days to keep recovery points in the warm tier from 15 to 30, 45, or 60 days.
For example, if the current setting is to keep recovery points in the warm tier for 15 days, all recovery points older than 15 days will move from warm to cold tier.
After you increase the threshold from 15 days to 45 days, the recovery points which are already in the cold tier will remain there. However, recovery points that are older than 45 days will now move to the cold tier.

📝 Note
​If the threshold is increased for an existing backup, then a warning is displayed that increasing the threshold for existing backup sets will increase the credit consumption.

You can change the number of days to keep recovery points in the warm tier from 60 days to 15, 30, or 45 days.
Before changing the set threshold, all recovery points not older than 60 days will remain in the warm tier.
However, after you decrease the threshold from 60 days to 30 days, all recovery points that were created 30 days ago will be moved to the cold tier. In addition, eligible recovery points based on the new threshold, will now be migrated to the cold tier after 30 days.

📝 Note
​If the threshold is decreased for an existing backup, then a warning is displayed that decreasing the threshold will have only XX days of warm recovery points.

Once LTR is enabled, you can access the following page to monitor your credit savings that you have made by enabling LTR for your backup policy.

On the menu bar, click Druva to access the Enterprise Workloads Dashboard. On the Dashboard, navigate to the Backup Data section to view the LTR savings for one year and the split of LTR and non-LTR data.

On the menu bar, click Storage to access the Storage page. On this page, you can view the split of LTR and non-LTR data, which is the amount of data in the cold and warm tiers, respectively.

On the menu bar, click Reports to access the Reports page. On the Manage Reports page, click the report link to view the report with the corresponding details.

On the Credit Consumption Report page, check the credit saving summary to view the details of your LTR savings.

You can also view the credit consumption summary of Druva credits consumed over a certain period.

On the Storage Consumption by Backup Sets report, you can view the LTR status and the warm tier retention threshold for each backup set.
The LTR Status displays Enabled or Disabled based on whether the LTR is enabled or not.
The Warm Tier Retention Threshold column displays the number of days for the backup set where LTR is enabled and a dash for the backup set where LTR is disabled.

You can view the LTR status and the warm tier retention threshold details in the audit trails for creating a backup policy, deleting a backup policy, and updating a backup policy.
On the menu bar, click Manage > Audit Trails to access the Audit Trails page.

On the Audit Trails page, select a backup policy action (create, update, or delete) in the list and click View Details.
The Action Details dialog box displays the details of current LTR status and warm tier retention threshold days where the LTR is enabled.

The backup policy is created with LTR enabled.

The backup policy where LTR was disabled earlier is updated with LTR enabled.

The backup policy where LTR was enabled earlier is updated with LTR disabled.

📝 Notes

At the time of restoration, data from the cold tier is retrieved, moved temporarily to the warm tier, and then restored. Once you initiate the restoration process, the data retrieval from the cold tier and its restore from the warm happen automatically. Warmed-up data is deleted from the warm tier after 10 days.

To restore the data from the cold tier (VMware as an example), perform the following steps:

No. They will remain as cold recovery points, even though the threshold is increased.

Yes. If recovery points are older than the set threshold, then they are eligible for the cold tier migration.

If the new policy has long-term retention (LTR) enabled and has the same or longer retention period than the existing policy, then no penalty will be incurred for moving the backup set or virtual machine.