Backup Retention Policy: Guide With Best Practices

If you are an IT admin or a business owner, you want your backup strategy to save your money instead of wasting it. Setting up a proper backup retention policy will be the core element to focus on.

We witness the following mistake so often: businesses back up everything they have and keep it for as long as possible. As a result, they end up with enormous bills for storage or compliance violations.

A good backup retention policy solves this problem by determining what to keep and what to delete. Thanks to this, you can find and restore the necessary files much quicker while automatically disposing of the data clutter.

But how do you determine what data to keep and delete, and when? 

As a data protection company, we’ve composed a list of data backup retention policy best practices and tried-and-true tips. We’ve saved the most useful bits of advice for the end, so be sure to stick with us! 

What Is A Backup Retention Policy?

A backup retention policy is a set of rules that define the lifecycle of backed-up data in an organization.

A backup retention policy should answer four practical questions. 

• What backup data should be kept?
• How long should data be retained?
• Where and how should backups be stored? 
• When should backup data be deleted?

In summary, a good retention policy helps organizations avoid two very common problems: keeping unnecessary data for too long and deleting important data too soon.

Needless to say, a retention policy is crucial for businesses of every size. It helps you manage your data and backups, allowing you to control your records’ growth. 

Not having a retention policy will, at the very least, result in you spending lots of money on the storage of unnecessary files. 

In the worst-case scenario, not having a data backup policy may lead you to be out of compliance by not keeping important data long enough or even storing it unnecessarily.

Why Do Organizations Need A Backup Retention Policy?

Organizations need a backup retention policy to control data growth, reduce storage costs, support compliance, and recover critical information faster when needed. 

Many organizations make the mistake of backing up everything and keeping it indefinitely. That may feel safe, but it can create expensive storage clutter and make it harder to find the right file when recovery matters. 

In some situations, it can further increase your cost for transferring or moving that data. 

A clear retention policy helps organizations:

• Keep data for the right amount of time.
• Delete data when it no longer has business or legal value.
• Reduce unnecessary storage costs.
• Support disaster recovery planning.
• Protect sensitive data.
• Respond faster to audits, legal requests, or recovery events.

What Defines Your Backup Retention Policy?

Two things to keep in mind when defining your backup retention policy: the business needs and legal or compliance requirements. 

How do you find out these things? Simply by seeking assistance from regulatory bodies related to your operation, and  executive management of your company.

What Compliance Requirements Apply?

Different industries and geographic regions have different rules for data storage, retention, deletion, and location of that backup. 

Some data may need to be kept for years and not retrieved often. Some data needs to be kept for years and accessible within minutes. 

Other data may need to be deleted as soon as it’s no longer needed. Because requirements can vary, involve your legal or risk teams for a compliance checkup before finalizing retention rules. Read more about the most common data compliance regulations here→

What Business Needs Should The Policy Support?

Most organizations rely on operational data such as emails, spreadsheets, documents, and customer records. Backing up this data assists in reducing downtime after accidental deletion, cyberattacks, outages, or other disruptions. 

To get to an answer, answer the following questions:

• What do we need to keep?
• Why do we need to keep it?
• How long do we need to keep it?
• How quickly would we need to restore it?

How To Create A Data Retention Policy? (Step-by-step) 

Follow these steps to create a practical backup retention policy that aligns with the needs of the organization. 

1. Classify Data by Type and Needs

Start by grouping data according to business value, compliance, sensitivity and retrieval needs.

Classify data by asking:

• Is this data required for compliance?
• Is this data required for business continuity?
• Is this data public, proprietary, confidential, or regulated?
• How quickly would the business need to recover it?

This step also helps define Recovery Time Objective (RTO), and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which are important parts of disaster recovery planning. 

2. Categorize Data by Lifecycle

As we’ve pointed out before, not all backup data should be retained for the same amount of time, nor does it have to be retrieved in the same fashion. Some records may only need to be retained for a few months, or they may need to be archived for years. 

By defining this, you can create a separate backup plan for each dataset depending on the time they should be kept and their purposes. 

• Records retained for up to six months.
• Records retained for one year.
• Records that are retained for longer periods for legal or regulatory compliance.
• For some data, it may be more reasonable and cost-effective to delete it after a shorter period because it is outdated and not subject to retention requirements. 

3. Decide What Should be Deleted and When

A retention policy should clearly define retention rules. Keeping data longer than necessary can increase legal, security, and storage risk. 

Delayed or misconfigured deletion can lead the organization to:

• Higher storage costs.
• More complicated data navigation
• Greater exposure if data must be deleted after a defined period
• More difficult recovery workflows

If regulations require data deletion after a specific period, schedule secure deletion through a purge process. If no law requires deletion, consider keeping at least one final version of important files for recovery purposes. 

For example, Article 5 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that organizations must destroy personal data that is proven to be no longer required for business or legal purposes.

By defining what data should be deleted and setting up the Purge function, you automatically erase files that match certain criteria. But we recommend keeping at least one last version of the file on the off-chance, unless the law determines otherwise. 

4. Define the Number and Type of Versions to Store

Backup versions preserve changes made to a file over time. Your policy should define how many versions to keep and how long to keep them. Versioning rules may cover:

• Additional inactive versions
• Last versions of deleted files
• Existing data
• Deleted data

Version retention should balance recovery needs with storage costs. Keeping too many versions can become expensive, while keeping too few can limit recovery options and, as we said, increase your exposure.

5. Choose Backup Types and  Frequency

There are three common backup types:

• Full backup – a full copy of all existing files;
• Differential backup – a copy of all changes made from the last full backup;
• Incremental backup – a copy of all changes since the last backup of any kind.

To understand which backup type will be the most beneficial for your business, read our guide to Full vs. Differential vs. Incremental Backups.

Two Things That Define Your Retention Policy

To create a data retention policy, you need to know two things: 

1. Business needs the retention policy must solve for your organization;
2. Compliance regulations regarding data applied to your organization.

How do you find out these things? Simply by seeking assistance from the law department and C-level management of your company.

Compliance regulations that apply to your organization

There are different compliance regulations that can be applied to your data. There are regional, country-specific, or industry-related laws. To comply with these, you may need to keep some data sets for years in data centers located in specific regions. 

Sometimes, these regulations can even be mutually exclusive. In these cases, you need to address these issues with your law department or outsource compliance experts. 

Read more about the most common data compliance regulations here→

Company business needs

To function properly, most companies rely on operational day-to-day data flow like emails, spreadsheets, text documents, etc. By backing up this business-critical information, you secure it from data losses and reduce the potential downtime due to disruptions that usually cost businesses a fortune.

The time for which you have to store this data depends solely on your business goals. The mistake many companies make is keeping this type of data for as long as possible. It feels like a safe choice, but it will only take up space and computing resources by piling up your storage with useless information.

To avoid this mistake, answer the following questions:

1. What data to keep?
2. Why do we need to keep it?
3. For how long do we need to keep it?

If you aren’t sure about the answers, direct these questions to your company’s management/business department.

Backup Retention Policy: Best Practices to Follow 

1. Classify data by type and needs

As we pointed out earlier, your backup retention policy will be defined largely by external (law) and internal (company) needs. By this division, you understand the ultimate goal of every data piece and what the company needs they cover. 

You may never need to use some data, but it has to stay put in a secure place for legal purposes. Meanwhile, the need for business continuity might dictate you to come back (recover) other data ASAP in the event of an incident. 

When you categorize data this way, your retention policy’s other components will naturally fall into place. Plus, you get to understand the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for your data, which are the core of your disaster recovery strategy.

Here is how you need to classify data:

1. What data is valuable from the point of compliance with regulations;
2. What data is valuable from the point of your business needs;
3. What data refers to public, proprietary, or confidential information.

2. Categorize data by lifecycle

Again, the lifecycle of backed-up data is strictly determined by the data retention compliance requirements and business goals.

Not all data should be stored for the same retention period. Moreover, some of the data simply can’t be stored and must be erased after a certain period of time. For one set of data, you may need to archive it for ten years and delete it right after this period has expired. For the other set of data, it must be is more reasonable and cost-effective to delete it after some time because it’s outdated and not susceptible to any regulations. 

By defining this, you can create a separate backup plan for each dataset depending on the time they should be kept and their purposes. 

Here is how you can categorize data by their lifecycle:

1. Records that should be retained for up to six months;
2. Records that should be retained for one year;
3. Records that should be retained for up to three years, and so on.

3. Decide what and when to delete

Deleting data in time is one of those critical rules companies often fail to follow because it may feel counterintuitive. And yet, holding onto data when you should’ve deleted it potentially puts your company in hot water.

Here are the possible implications you may experience for not deleting data in time:

• Putting your company at risk of legal proceedings and penalties for non-compliance;
• Risking your client’s data security and your reputation;
• Cluttering and overburdening your hardware/software with unnecessary data;
• Spending money on extra storage occupied with data that has no value for the company;
• Making data navigation too complicated.

Some compliance regulations make it obligatory to schedule the secure deletion of data that falls under certain categories and matches certain criteria. For example, article 5 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that organizations must destroy personal data that are proven to be no longer required for business or legal purposes.

By defining what data should be deleted and setting up the Purge function, you automatically erase files that match certain criteria. But we recommend keeping at least one last version of the file on the off-chance unless the law determines otherwise. 

4. Define the number and type of versions to store

The backup version is a copy of the original file that contains all changes that have been made to a document. 

Use these parameters of the versioned backup: 

By the number of versions to store:

• Additional (inactive) versions
• Last versions of files that have been deleted

By the amount of time to store:

• Existing data
• Deleted data

5. Decide about the types of backup and their frequency

There are three types of backup:

• Full backup – a full copy of all existing files;
• Differential backup – a copy of all changes made from the last full backup;
• Incremental backup – a copy of all changes since the last backup of any kind (full, differential, or incremental).

To understand which backup type will be the most beneficial for your business, read our guide to Full vs. Differential vs. Incremental Backups.

6. Choose a Compliant and Cost-Effective Data Backup Service

The right backup service should fit your data environment, compliance needs, recovery goals, and budget. 

Consider:

1. Cloud-to-Cloud or On-Premises.

There are pros and cons to both options, but we are of the opinion that if you keep your data in the cloud services like Google or Microsoft, cloud-to-cloud backup is the best option for your business. We justify our opinion in this article.

2. Scalability and Flexibility. 

Some backup services have a fixed number of licenses you have to buy to start using the service, which may be a waste of money for small businesses. Start with a solution that grows with the organization.

The SaaS subscription model with monthly payments and a minimum number of licenses to start from is usually the most cost-effective option for most businesses due to its flexibility.

3. Type of Backup and Restore

For small-to-medium businesses that keep data in the cloud, a backup service with an incremental-based backup model, granular restore, and version control will be the best fit.

To get the full list, read our guide →How to Choose a Perfect Backup Service in 10 Steps

P.S.: To see how professional backup service works:

Try SpinOne for free

Where Should You Store Backups?

Backups should be stored in locations that support recovery, security, compliance, and cost control. Many organizations follow the 3-2-1 backup rule:

• Keep at least three total copies of data.
• Store copies on two different types of storage or platforms.
• Keep one copy off-site.

Remember that backup storage may include cloud, physical drives, off-site storage or a combination of the above. The right choice depends on the organization’s infrastructure, compliance obligations, recovery goals, and budget.

What Is The Difference Between A Backup Policy And a Retention Policy?

A backup policy defines how data is copied so it can be recovered later. A retention policy defines how long backed-up data is kept before it is deleted. There’s a third item to keep in mind, though. Let’s review in simple terms:

• A backup policy: how and when data is backed up
• A retention policy: how long backup data is stored
• A disaster recovery policy: how systems and data are restored after a disruption

These three policies work together, but they are not the same.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

A backup retention policy helps organizations keep the right data for the right amount of time. It supports compliance, reduces storage waste, improves recovery workflows, and gives IT teams clear control over backup data.

The best policy starts with classification:

• Know what data matters, why it matters, how long it should be kept, and when it should be deleted.

From there:

• Define backup frequency, versioning, storage location, and secure deletion rules.

To simplify backup retention and recovery for cloud data, explore SpinOne and see how a professional backup service can help protect business-critical information for you.

Was this helpful?

Yes No