Hi ,

Please send me the direct message with your current retention policy settings for I could review them and recommend how to tweak them to avoid the Wasabi deletion fee.

Thank you.

You can work with Ivan offline for help on tweaking the retention. But I want to mention a few things as you look to review your retention and backup scheduling knowing about Wasabi's minimum retention requirements.

Early deletion fees are billed no differently than the data you keep stored. Meaning, the costs will be the same. As an example, if you have 5 TB of data and 10 TB of deleted data billed at an average of 45 days for early deletion, then you have parity with what Wasabi would bill for 10 TB of data stored.

You can, of course, tweak the retention settings to keep more data available (say 60 versus 30 days). Since you're paying for the storage anyway, you might as well try and keep more data available for restores.

Ultimately, your retention should be driven from business restore point objectives. If that number is less than the Wasabi minimum retention, then you may have early deletion fees as a result.

There are a couple things you can do to minimize storage requirements:

• Do not keep data longer than 90 days if you do not need backups older than 90 days
• For image based backups, run the backups less frequently,but make sure they sync up with retention needs. A example of something not to do is run a full backup every 180 days and set retention to 90 days because you'll need to back up 360 days before the first 180 days can be removed from storage. A better use case would be to run full backups every 30 days and keep 60 days in storage. That way, when you hit 90 days, the first 30 can safely be removed from storage, you're eliminating most, if not all, early deletion fees, and you have 60 days to restore. You could run the full backups more frequently, but if you find the full size is much larger than its associated incrementals, you'll end up with more storage use, but the ability to remove backups more quickly (say, every 14 days).
  
  But work with the team offline to tweak your settings.
  
  Thanks.

Or you could send the backups to Backblaze, which has no minimum retention period and costs only $5.00 per TB per month. While we keep our data file backups for 90 days, we run new Image/VHDx backups to the cloud each month and only keep one copy in the Cloud.

Yes Backblaze does charge $0.01 cent per GB for downloads (vs Wasabi's free downloads), but we only do large restores a few times a year - a 200GB Image download costs a whopping $2.00.

Thanks for the very helpful suggestions!

IvanS,

Thanks for your offer. We do a daily Block-level incremental backup, and once a month a Full backup. On the day that the monthly Full backup runs we set the start time of the Full backup to be 15 minutes prior to the daily Block-level incremental backup believing that the daily backup will be skipped on this one day a month.

Our current retention policy is to keep 30 versions, to delete versions older than 1 month, and to always keep the last version.

Our business requirement is to keep a minimum of 30 days of backups. If more can be kept for less money, or for the same amount of money in storage cost, that is fine.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

With those settings, you'll eventually have 60 days' of backup in storage (2 sets of 30 days each) and then the oldest backup set of 30 days can be removed, leaving you with 30 days. And the process starts again. There will be some early delete fees for the oldest set when removed since it's under the 90 days' of retention. But since the old full backup is likely the largest file and is also the oldest, there's only about 30 days left in retention. If you only need 30 days saved, then I would not worry about the early delete fee. But if you want more backups saved, you can keep 60 days instead of 30 days (use same 30 versions though) without any major impact in storage fees.

Thank you David. I appreciate your insight and suggestions.