What are the retention and versioning settings?

Retention and the possibility to control over how long you want to store copies is one of the most important aspects of backup and data protection. Moreover, you might have some specific requirements regarding retention due to the Shared Responsibility Model of your cloud service provider, your company's legal requirements, compliance, or SLA.

You can define the rules in three ways:

• by indicating the time of each copy to be kept in the storage. Those parameters are set separately for the full, differential, and incremental backup (see: Basic retention scheme and GFS)
• by indicating the number of copies you want to keep,
• disabling rules, and keeping all versions.

Retention rules let you compromise between your legal/company requirements and effective managing of storage capacity. Additionally, the possibility to store your copies for a very long-term allows you to use GitProtect.io for GitLab, Bitbucket, or GitHub archive purposes.

There are two important assumptions about the versioning - we never delete the last version and GitProtect will always make sure not to disturb the continuity of the version chains.