--- schema_version: "1" id: 38bcdca0396121a02a89bc86a87e2a7866c692133a8df341a52345edb7de7eaf title: Backup Retention Policies in Backup & Recover for Salesforce collection: admin version: current locale: en-us portal_url: https://docs.salesforce.com/admin/current/en-us/platform/264-0-0/backup_recover_o_retention_policies.md canonical_url: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=platform.backup_recover_o_retention_policies.htm&release=264.0.0&type=5 source_site: help.salesforce.com content_type: documentation content_hash: 04903938c7a09da2c880e801c2d089596dd45712870cd4de6d3e27471922c297 description: Retention policies help you meet requirements for keeping Salesforce data backed up. You can adjust retention periods and retain backups indefinitely when needed for legal procedures. products: - Security - Salesforce Platform release: "264" --- # Backup Retention Policies in Backup & Recover for Salesforce Retention policies help you meet requirements for keeping Salesforce data backed up. You can adjust retention periods and retain backups indefinitely when needed for legal procedures. A data retention policy is an established protocol for retaining information for operational or regulatory compliance needs. Retention policies can be set to meet any internal requirements set by your organization for keeping data backed up. Your backups are stored on encrypted volumes for a default number of years. Admins can edit backup retention periods as well as their frequency. The Retention feature specifies how long we retain a copy of the backup for your use. For example, for a retention policy set to six months, once a backup is six months old, we automatically purge it to ensure you remain compliant with internal data policies. On the day after retention ends, the Own application marks the backup as deleted, and the backup appears grayed out in the Backup History list. You will no longer be able to access this backup dataset. For scheduled backups, we use the grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention method, with daily, weekly, and monthly policies.

Daily	Configure how long to store daily scheduled backups.
Weekly	Configure how long to store one backup per week. Backups that run on the selected day —or the closest successful backup, if that day's backup failed or completed with errors—tier to weekly backups. The weekly backup policy overrides the daily policy for these backups.
Monthly	Configure how long to store one backup per month. Backups that run on the the selected day—or the closest successful backup, if that day's backup failed or completed with errors—tier to monthly backups. The monthly backup policy overrides the daily and weekly policies for these backups.
Yearly	Configure how long to store one backup per year. Backups that run on the the selected day—or the closest successful backup, if that day's backup failed or completed with errors—tier to yearly backups. The yearly backup policy overrides the daily, weekly, and monthly policies for these backups.

![Note](https://sf-zdocs-cdn-prod.zoominsoftware.com/tdta-platform-own_from_salesforce-264-0-0-production-enus/8ac98673-ede2-4046-a41e-2d5c846f24ff/images/icon_note.png) Note Even though you select a specific day of the week or month for your retention policy, the system prioritizes successful backups. If the backup on your selected day failed or completed with errors, the system retains a successful backup from the same period instead. You can manage your retention policies on the Options tab for a service. ## Attachments Once a month, the Own application checks which attachment files are related to backups. Files that are not associated with any backup are purged. ## Retention Policy Tags on Backup History The weekly retention policy behavior determines the best candidate for the "weekly" retention daily. Leveraging a logic that plans for the worst, the weekly retention tag will appear to migrate daily until it achieves the closest match for that week and will "set" on it. For example, the weekly retention is set to Saturday, and today is November 2nd, 2021, a Tuesday. In the best-case scenario, the weekly retention tag will show correctly on October 30th, 2021 - a Saturday, but will migrate on November 2nd until settling on November 7th, 2021. Suppose, for some reason, Friday was the last backup day. In that case, the Own application ensures a weekly data set will always be available next to the scenario set by the customer's retention policy, which means Friday for that week. The retention policy will only allow automatic backups per configured plan. Meaning, if you are on the default one auto-backup a day plan and have an automatic backup scheduled for 10 AM, which runs for 2 hours, and then reconfigure the scheduler to run automatically again at 10 PM, the retention policy will delete the older backup to conform to the plan. ![Note](https://sf-zdocs-cdn-prod.zoominsoftware.com/tdta-platform-own_from_salesforce-264-0-0-production-enus/8ac98673-ede2-4046-a41e-2d5c846f24ff/images/icon_note.png) Note Manual backups do not affect this count. The automatic scheduler is always running synced to UTC. ## Edit Salesforce Retention Policies Adjust policies to retain backups for a specific duration, after which the backups are automatically purged. You can configure daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly frequencies, specifying how often the Own application checks and acts on the retention period policy. The frequency can be driven via a matrix to achieve specific business use case policy configurations. ![Note](https://sf-zdocs-cdn-prod.zoominsoftware.com/tdta-platform-own_from_salesforce-264-0-0-production-enus/8ac98673-ede2-4046-a41e-2d5c846f24ff/images/icon_note.png) Note Applying a new retention policy with a period less than the original retention period may result in the automatic purging of older backups. ![Note](https://sf-zdocs-cdn-prod.zoominsoftware.com/tdta-platform-own_from_salesforce-264-0-0-production-enus/8ac98673-ede2-4046-a41e-2d5c846f24ff/images/icon_note.png) Note Legal Hold is a retention policy feature for companies that find themselves in legal procedures requiring them to store data for undisclosed periods. Legal Hold is intended for specific backups that should never be deleted, enabling storing and not losing original evidence (such as transcripts, financial documents, and pictures) for use in legal matters. If you need to activate the Legal Hold attribute, please contact our Customer Support Team. 1. Click Edit Retention Policy. 2. Select whether to Always keep last 15 backups. 3. Select the Retention period from the drop-down list. 4. Click Apply Policy. 5. Click Update. The updates will be applied within 10 days.