Need technical information about the ODR retention policy for each backup and the impact after they expire.
Before December 2023, in On Demand Recovery, the retention policy for backups had only 4 possible values:
1) No retention period (Disabled)
2) 1 year
3) 2 years
4) 3 years
Back then, the default value was no retention period (retention disabled). However, after December 2023, it became mandatory to set a retention policy, and it was no longer possible to have backups without it. The maximum retention policy time was increased for up to 5 years, which became the new default option and also allowed customers to set the retention period by days, as explained in the User Guide:
NOTE: The retention policy is set on the backup at the time the backup is taken and stored. This means that if you change the retention period, it only affects new backups and does not update the retention period on older backups.
It is important to mention that currently, when a backup expires due to the retention policy, it gets automatically deleted/removed from your ODR organization (including the packed and unpacked data) along with the activity events trail information of it.
Moreover, a notification was sent out to customers in January 2024 to inform them of this behavior change, and we alerted all customers to review their retention period and adjust it if needed. See below a screenshot of it:
