System and custom policies
System policies
By default, Alcion offers a set of predefined system policies:
- On-demand - Users with the appropriate permissions can initiate backups on resources explicitly at their discretion.
- 1x Recurring (Essentials Plan) - Alcion automatically initiates backups once a day.
- Intelligent(3x Adaptive) (Security Plan) - Alcion automatically initiates backups 3-times a day by selecting optimal backups times. For more details about this policy, see the intelligent backups documentation.
- Excluded - Resources with this policy are explicitly excluded from backups. Resources marked with this policy will also remain unchanged when performing bulk policy changes.
- None - Resources with this policy are returned to their initial state where no backups are performed. The resources are still subject to bulk policy changes
These policies offer predefined retention determined by your subscription plan.
Disabling backups through the Excluded or None policy may result in backup deletion.
Custom policies
Compared to system policies, custom policies provide additional flexibility. They allow control over the retention period of the backups for resources to which the policy is applied.
The minimum duration is 1 month, and there is no maximum duration limit.
For security reasons, to protect backups from unauthorized deletion, when a policy with shorter retention is applied to a resource protected with a longer retention policy, the shorter retention doesn't take effect for 2 weeks. Administrators will get a notification in their Daily Activity Report that this has occurred.