Retention Policies

What Are Retention Policies?

Every backup you create consumes storage space. Without a retention policy, backups accumulate indefinitely until you run out of disk space or hit your cloud storage quota. Retention policies solve this by automatically removing old backups based on rules you define.

Retention policies help you:

• Control storage costs — cloud storage bills scale with the number and size of backups you keep.
• Reduce clutter — dozens of outdated backups make it harder to find the restore point you need.
• Meet compliance requirements — some industries require data to be retained for a specific number of days, while others require deletion after a maximum period.
• Protect incremental chains — SafeGuard handles chain dependencies so you never lose the ability to restore.

Retention Settings

SafeGuard provides two layers of retention control: global settings that apply site-wide, and per-schedule retention that lets you fine-tune each schedule independently.

Global Settings

These settings are found under SafeGuard → Settings → Retention.

Per-Schedule Retention

Each schedule has its own independent retention policy with two modes:

Configuring Retention

# View current retention settings
wp safeguard settings get retention

# Set backup limit to 30
wp safeguard settings set retention.limit 30

# Enable delete-by-age mode
wp safeguard settings set retention.deleteByAge true

# Enable auto-delete of local copies after upload
wp safeguard settings set retention.deleteLocalAfterUpload true

# List all schedules to find the schedule ID
wp safeguard schedule list

# Update retention for a specific schedule (keep 14 backups)
wp safeguard schedule update <schedule-id> --retention='{"type":"count","value":14}'

# Update retention to keep backups for 90 days
wp safeguard schedule update <schedule-id> --retention='{"type":"days","value":90}'

# Get current retention settings
curl -X GET "https://example.com/wp-json/safeguard/v1/settings/retention" \
  -H "X-WP-Nonce: <nonce>"

# Update retention settings
curl -X POST "https://example.com/wp-json/safeguard/v1/settings/retention" \
  -H "X-WP-Nonce: <nonce>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"keepCount": 30, "keepDays": 90, "keepMinimum": 3}'

# Update a schedule's retention policy
curl -X PUT "https://example.com/wp-json/safeguard/v1/schedules/<schedule-id>" \
  -H "X-WP-Nonce: <nonce>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"retention": {"type": "count", "value": 14}}'

How Retention Works

Understanding when and how SafeGuard enforces retention helps you plan your backup strategy.

When Cleanup Runs

Retention is enforced at two points:

1. After every scheduled backup completes — SafeGuard checks the schedule's retention policy and deletes any backups that exceed the limit. This is the primary enforcement mechanism.
2. During daily maintenance — A daily maintenance job cleans up orphaned temporary files, stalled jobs (no activity for over 1 hour), and completed job records older than 30 days.

Deletion Order

When a count-based retention policy triggers cleanup:

1. Backups are sorted by creation date, newest first.
2. The most recent N backups (where N is your retention value) are kept.
3. Everything beyond that limit is deleted — both the backup file and its database record.

When an age-based retention policy triggers cleanup:

1. SafeGuard calculates the cutoff date (current time minus N days).
2. Any backup created before the cutoff is deleted.

Incremental Chain Handling

Incremental backups form chains: a full backup followed by a series of incremental snapshots. SafeGuard manages these chains with built-in safeguards:

• Maximum chain length — defaults to 10 incremental backups per chain. After reaching this limit, SafeGuard automatically creates a new full backup.
• Full backup age threshold — defaults to 30 days. If the chain's base full backup is older than this, a new full backup is triggered.
• Automatic full backup frequency — defaults to every 7 days, ensuring fresh restore points regardless of chain length.

Per-Schedule Retention

The real power of SafeGuard's retention system is running multiple schedules with different retention policies. This lets you balance protection, storage cost, and restore granularity.

Example: Three-Tier Strategy

This gives you 6 database snapshots per day (90 total spanning ~15 days), 30 days of incremental recovery, and 8 weeks of full backup history.

How Per-Schedule Retention Differs from Global

Storage Cost Estimation

Use these rough guidelines to estimate how much storage your retention strategy requires. Actual sizes vary based on your site's content, database size, and compression level.

Estimating Total Storage

Multiply the per-backup size by the number of backups your retention policy keeps:

Total storage = (Full backups x Full size) + (Incremental backups x Incremental size) + (DB backups x DB size)

Example — Medium WooCommerce site with the three-tier strategy above:

• Weekly full: 8 backups x 800 MB = 6.4 GB
• Daily incremental: 30 backups x 100 MB = 3 GB
• 4-hour database: 90 backups x 50 MB = 4.5 GB
• Total: ~14 GB of cloud storage

Recommended Strategies by Site Type

Best Practices

1. Always keep at least one remote copy — local backups are useless if your server's disk fails. Configure a storage provider and ensure every schedule uploads to it.

2. Test restores periodically — a backup you cannot restore from is no backup at all. Restore to a staging environment at least once a month to verify integrity.

3. Monitor storage usage — keep the Storage limit warning setting enabled. SafeGuard will notify you before you run out of space so you can adjust retention or upgrade your storage plan.

4. Use per-schedule retention, not global — global retention is a safety net for manual backups. For automated schedules, always set retention directly on each schedule for precise control.

5. Separate database and file schedules — database backups are small and fast, so you can run them frequently with high retention. File backups are larger, so use incremental mode and keep fewer copies.

6. Delete local copies after upload — if you store backups in S3, Google Drive, or another remote provider, enable Delete local copy after upload to reclaim server disk space.

7. Keep at least 3 backups minimum — even with aggressive retention, never set your count below 3. This ensures you have fallback restore points if the most recent backup is corrupted.

8. Review retention quarterly — as your site grows, backup sizes increase. Check your storage usage and adjust retention values to stay within budget.