About global retention and deduplication

Unitrends systems are designed to use all available storage for protecting data (see Storage allocation and distribution). As scheduled or immediate backups are performed, or as backups are replicated to a target system, the oldest backups are deleted to ingest new backups. See About retention control for details.

To increase retention, Unitrends systems utilize adaptive deduplication to remove duplicate data blocks from backups. With deduplication, backup sizes decrease as duplicate blocks are removed, thereby increasing the number of backups that can be stored on the system, also referred to as on-system retention. Native deduplication is enabled by default.

Use the following procedures to balance system performance versus retention to suit your environment.

To configure global retention settings

1

Access the Setup Wizard Setup system retention and backup window characteristics step, or select Settings > Storage and Retention > Retention.

2

Select the desired Balance Retention and Backup Performance option. See the next section for a description of each option.

3

Click Next to save the settings and continue with the Setup Wizard, or click Close to exit without saving.

Balancing backup performance and retention

You can tune system storage to fit the backup window and retention objectives of your environment by selecting from the following options.

Performance/retention options	Description
Balance retention and backup performance (recommended setting)	This is the recommended setting for managing the ingest rate and retention on the system. With this setting, a predictive mechanism is used to dynamically alter the size of the landing zone based on the backup strategies selected.
Minimize backup window	Use this setting where backup window requirements are critical. With this setting, a landing zone (reserve area) is created which is large enough to hold the data set that is being protected. This guarantees the fastest ingest rate. However, to meet the landing zone requirements, older backups are more aggressively deleted.
Maximize retention	Use this setting where retention is critical. The data protection ingest rate is slower. The landing zone is kept to a minimum to ensure maximum retention.