The first full backup of each month will be kept for three months.Įach weekly full backup will be kept for 12 weeks.Įach weekly full backup will be kept for six weeks. The third full backup of each year will be kept for five years. If your intention is to delete old LTR backups before their retention period expires, you will need to manually delete the backups.

The retention of existing backups will not be modified. For example, if weekly backup retention (W), monthly backup retention (M), or yearly backup retention (Y) is modified, the new retention setting will only apply to new backups. Each backup will be kept in the long-term storage according to the policy parameters that are configured when the LTR backup is created.Īny change to the LTR policy applies only to future backups. If the specified WeekOfYear is in the past when the policy is configured, the first LTR backup will be created in the following year. If you specify Y, one backup during the week specified by WeekOfYear will be copied to the long-term storage. If you specify M, the first backup of each month will be copied to the long-term storage. If you specify W, one backup every week will be copied to the long-term storage. To enable LTR, you can define a policy using a combination of four parameters: weekly backup retention (W), monthly backup retention (M), yearly backup retention (Y), and week of year (WeekOfYear). The LTR policy for each database in SQL Database can also specify how frequently the LTR backups are created.

The copy is a background job that has no performance impact on the database workload. If an LTR policy is configured, these backups are copied to different blobs for long-term storage. Long-term backup retention (LTR) leverages the full database backups that are automatically created to enable point in time restore (PITR).

Long-term retention on Managed Instance is currently available in public preview in Azure Public regions only.

The long dark storage