Policy Management

Use the Policy Management property page to add or update a backup policy, which controls how different backup versions are retained on local shadow volumes on stand-alone snapshot configurations.

Backup retention on local shadow volumes is determined by version and time-based policies. Ensure that sufficient local storage space is available on local shadow volumes for your VSS backup. The amount of storage space that is required depends on the VSS Provider that you use.

The following fields are displayed in the property page:

Policy
Specify the unique name of a backup policy for the stand-alone configuration.
Number of Snapshots to keep
Specify the number of backup versions to retain on local shadow volumes. Enter a value from 1 to 9999. Type NL to retain as many backup versions as permitted by available storage space. The default value is 2.

This parameter does not apply to incremental backup versions of SQL Server data. Incremental backups do not participate in expirations because of version limit because there is never more than one version of an incremental backup object. There is only one version of an incremental backup object because incremental backups are always uniquely named.

Days to keep a Snapshot
Specify the number of days to retain backup versions on local shadow volumes. Enter a value from 0 to 9999. Type NL to retain as many backup versions as permitted by available storage space. When the value is set to 0, snapshots are kept for the current day. The default value is 30.