A data retention policy describes how long to keep data to meet business or legal requirements. You can configure these policies to align with your organization’s internal requirements for data backups and control how long Salesforce stores your backups.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions with the Backup & Recover Data and Backup & Recover Files add-on licenses |
Salesforce stores your backups on encrypted volumes and retains them for a set number of years by default. Modify how long to retain your backups based on when the backup took place. After the retention period ends, we delete the backup and it's no longer accessible.
We use the grandfather-father-son (GFS) retention method, with daily, weekly, and monthly policies.
| Default | Configure how long the frequent backups (backups that run multiple times a day) are stored, up to 30 days. |
| Daily | Configure how long to store the first daily scheduled backup that runs in a day. If your backups are scheduled to run at 11:59 PM, the first successful backup that runs from this time is your daily backup. |
| Weekly | Configure how long to store one backup per week. Backups that run on Saturdays—or the closest successful backup, if Saturday 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 first day of the month—or the closest successful backup, if the first backup failed or completed with errors—tier to monthly backups. The monthly backup policy overrides the daily and weekly policies for these backups. |
Example The daily retention policy is set to 10 years, so all scheduled daily backups are
retained for 10 years. The weekly retention policy is set to 15 years. The backup that runs on
Saturday becomes a weekly backup. Its retention policy updates to 15 years, overriding the
10-year daily policy.
- Configure Your Backup Retention Policy
Choose how long to retain your backups.