In order to encourage clients to keep their backups up to date, and to give them the opportunity to request the deletion of old, redundant backups, the HFS service issues a rolling series of email updates. The nature of this email is as follows:
- On a daily basis, reminders of when the daily and/or weekly scheduled backups have failed or been missed are sent to email contacts.
- Contacts for machines that have not contacted the HFS Backup service for more than 4 weeks are advised by mail that the backups for this machine are consequently becoming stale and correspondingly less valid in the event of data loss on these machines.
- If a machine has not contacted the HFS Backup service for more than 10 weeks, contacts are advised by email that this level of inactivity does not correspond to our guidelines of use requiring that regular backups of active data are made. A warning is thus issued that should the machines fail to backup within 28 days of this notice, then it will be removed from the HFS Backup service and the backup data deleted.
- Clients are advised when the backups of any drives/volumes/partition/filesystems become more than 10 weeks old and thus can no longer be considered as active backups. A warning is issued that these backups will be deleted if they are not refreshed within 28 days of this notice.
Please note that only old backups are candidates here.
You may have a mixture of old and recent backups. In such cases your recent backups, those that have been refreshed within the last 10 weeks and are thus considered active, will be retained. The messages you receive will refer only to backups of drive partitions that are older than 10 weeks.
