Question: We need to keep month-end and year-end backups for a period of 3 years. Is it possible to restore a 3 year old backup on your system? If so, what is the procedure?

Answer: Yes it is possible to restore a backup from many years past. Our system can be set to automatically delete files older than x days. The default is 90. It can also be set to save a copy of a file older than that if it only has one copy. This feature is set by default to ON. These two features are set up in the endpoint software, so they can be set on a per-client basis.

In addition to the endpoint managing its own files, you can manually remove files from the Server when they are no longer needed in online storage. They are then no longer available for the endpoint to restore. These files can be archived offline and copied back to the Server when needed. After they are copied back they can be restored by the endpoint.

There is no automated procedure built into our software to do this on the Server side. You can set up procedures to do this using standard directory and file management software off the shelf. The Parter's Portal has some downloadable utilities that can help automate the server-side procedures.

It might be easier to simply set up two separate Backup Sets for month-end and year-end backups. These can then be managed separately from regular backups, which will make them fairly easy to archive, and maybe small enough to simply keep in online storage. The automatic file management features of the endpoint software, described in the first paragraph, can be set not only endpoint-by-endpoint, but also Backup Set by Backup Set. So, each Backup Set can have its own separate rules for retiring files.