Creating data archives

R‑Cloud enables you to create archives of your protected data and keep them for a longer period of time. By archiving data, the data is stored for future reference on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. Your data is isolated from current activity and safely stored in a secure cloud archive location.

Prerequisite

Only if you plan to select a manually created target for the data archive. The target must be set up. For instructions, see Setting up targets.

To access the Policies panel, in the navigation pane, click Policies Policies. Alternatively, in the Dashboard panel, click the Policies widget title.

Procedure

  1. In the Policies panel, click Archiving Archiving. The Archiving dialog box opens.
  2. Click New New.
  3. Enter a name for your data archive and, optionally, its description.

  4. Add any of the following archiving options to the list of the enabled options by clicking it:

    Daily Allows you to create a daily archive of data.
    Weekly Allows you to create a weekly archive of data.
    Monthly Allows you to create a monthly archive of data.
    Yearly Allows you to create a yearly archive of data.

  5. In the Start at fields, specify the hour and the minute when the archiving task should start.

  6. From the Time zone drop-down menu, specify the appropriate time zone.

  7. Only if you have enabled the Weekly, Monthly, and/or Yearly archiving option. Specify when to archive data.

  8. For each enabled archiving option, do the following:

    1. In the Retention box, set the retention period to be used.

      Note  Make sure that the retention period is longer than the RPO to prevent the data archive from expiring before a new backup is performed.

    2. From the Target drop-down menu, select one of the following for storing the data archive:

      • Automatically selected

        If you select this option, R‑Cloud creates a target and uses it for storing the data. If an automatically created target already exists, it is used instead. For details about automatically created targets, see Backup target types in R‑Cloud.

      • Any available target of your choice

    3. From the Storage class drop-down menu, select the storage class that you want to use for storing the data archive.

      If you select the Automatically selected option, the storage class is automatically selected based on the selected target type and the retention period:

      Retention period Assigned storage classes
      Less than 1 month

      • Amazon S3: S3 Standard

      • Azure: Hot tier

      • Google Cloud: Standard

      • S3 Compatible: S3 Standard
      1 month to less than 3 months

      • Amazon S3: S3 Standard-IA

      • Azure: Cool tier

      • Google Cloud: Nearline
      • S3 Compatible: S3 Standard
      3 months to less than 1 year

      • Amazon S3: S3 Glacier

      • Azure: Cold tier

      • Google Cloud: Coldline

      • S3 Compatible: S3 Standard
      More than 1 year

      • Amazon S3: S3 Deep Archive

      • Azure: Archive tier

      • Google Cloud: Archive

      • S3 Compatible: S3 Standard

      For details on storage classes, see the relevant cloud provider documentation.

  9. Click Save.

You can later edit any of the existing data archives (click Edit Edit and make the required modifications) or delete the ones that you do not need anymore (click Delete Delete). Keep in mind that you cannot modify a target on which an archiving task is in progress.

After you create a data archive, you can do the following:

  • Specify a data archive when creating a new policy. For details, see Creating custom policies.
  • Include the data archive into an existing policy. To do so, select the policy, click Edit Edit, and then make the required modifications.