In order to encourage users to keep their backups up to date, and to give them the opportunity to request the deletion of old, redundant backups, our service issues a rolling series of email updates. The nature of this email is as follows:
- On a daily basis, reminders of when the scheduled backups have failed or been missed are sent to email contacts.
- Contacts for machines that haven't communicated with the Storage Protect servers in over 4 weeks will receive a notification by mail. This is to alert you that the backups for these machines are becoming stale and, consequently, less reliable in the event of data loss.
- If a machine hasn't communicated with the Storage Protect servers for over 10 weeks, users will receive an email notification. This extended period of inactivity is inconsistent with our usage guidelines, which mandate regular backups of active data. The email serves as a warning, indicating that if the machine fails to initiate a backup within 28 days of receiving this notice, it will be removed from the backup service, and the stored backup data will be deleted.
- Users 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.