Backup clients in UBSi – Commvault are associated with a “Plan” (also called a Storage Policy) which determines the frequency of backup jobs and the retention pattern used for the backup data. We provide several Plans to all users by default, which are detailed below.
Common Features of all of our Plans
Backup Frequency
Incremental backups are performed daily, starting at 10pm. The exact start time for an individual client backup may vary due to the scheduling performed by the Commvault software.
The Commvault software automatically performs Full backups when needed. In many cases, it is able to automatically combine a previous Full with the subsequent Incrementals, forming a “Synthetic Full”. Synthetic Fulls behave exactly the same as a true Full, but avoid needing to re-copy the data from your system.
You can also start backups manually when needed, of course.
Offsite Replication
All of our plans include replication between our two data center locations. Clients will send their backup data to the primary site. Our systems will then replicate the data to the offsite location (normally within 24 hours), providing an offsite copy for redundancy.
Snapshots
(Not relevant to most users.) Some client systems support “hardware” snapshots. Commvault can optionally be configured to trigger a hardware snapshot when it performs a backup. The snapshot is stored on the client system, not on the UBSi – Commvault infrastructure. Some types of clients support advanced configuration which may utilize these snapshots improve backup performance or provide other benefits. Unless otherwise noted, all of our Plans are configured to retain these snapshots for 7 days.
Available Plans
These plans are available to all users of UBSi-Commvault.
31 Days (Default)
This is our recommended plan for most use cases.
Backup Retention (both sites): 31 days
Additional Retention: None
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
Extended
This adds additional retention for users who occasionally need to perform restores of files deleted longer than 31 days ago.
Backup Retention (both sites): 31 days
Additional Retention: Quarterly Fulls retained for 1 year
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
Hershey 31 Days
This plan can be used for clients physically located at Hershey.
(In particular, for virtual machines in VM Hosting’s “Hershey” Cloud.)
Backup Retention (both sites): 31 days
Additional Retention: None
Primary Site: Hershey
Offsite: University Park
Limited-Access Plans
These Plans are restricted to specific use cases and are not available for selection by default.
Access to any of these plans requires approval from our leadership as well as a consultation with the UBSi-Commvault administrators about the nature of your data and backup requirements.
Use of these plans may significantly increase the amount of backup data stored and the corresponding costs.
1MoDaily-1YrMonthly
This plan is currently used to meet an approved LionPATH business need.
Backup Retention (both sites): 31 days
Additional Retention (both sites): Monthly Fulls retained for 1 year
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
6MoDaily-1YrMonthly
This plan is currently used to meet an approved ATCE-ELS business need.
This plan is intended for a specific use case which generates unique files each day and never modifies the files. The long retention duration is somewhat mitigated by the unchanging nature of the data and the small size of the servers involved. Use of this plan on a generic server workload would generate a significant amount of backup data and corresponding costs.
Backup Retention (both sites): 6 months
Additional Retention (both sites): Monthly Fulls retained for 1 year
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
Archive 1 Year
This plan is used by the VM Hosting administrators to perform a single final backup of VMs before deletion, if required.
Backup Retention (both sites): 1 year
Additional Retention (both sites): none
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
Critical-UP
This plan is used to protect VMs designated as “critical” by Infrastructure leadership.
It provides a ransomware-resistant copy in the cloud which uses Object Locks to prevent early deletion.
Data in the cloud cannot be deleted early. Even if a node is able to be deleted early, users must continue to pay the cloud storage costs for the full retention duration.
The retention periods may be updated in future.
Backup Retention (University Park, Hershey): 31 days
Additional Retention (University Park, Cloud): Weekly Fulls retained for 90 days
Additional Retention (University Park, Cloud): Monthly Fulls retained for 7 months
Primary Site: University Park
Offsite: Hershey
Offsite: AWS Cloud (with Ransomware-resistant Object Locks)
Critical-HY
This is a variant of the “Critical-UP” Plan which uses Hershey as the primary copy instead. This Plan will be removed in future, and the associated backups will be moved to the “Critical-UP” Plan.
Backup Retention (University Park, Hershey): 31 days
Additional Retention (Hershey, Cloud): Weekly Fulls retained for 90 days
Additional Retention (Hershey, Cloud): Monthly Fulls retained for 7 months
Primary Site: Hershey
Offsite: University Park
Offsite: AWS Cloud (with Ransomware-resistant Object Locks)
Manual-UP
This is a variant of the “31 Days (Default)” plan which does not perform scheduled backups.
Manual-Extended
This is a variant of the “Extended-UP” plan which does not perform scheduled backups.
Manual-6MoDaily-1YrMonthly
This is a variant of the “6MoDaily-1YrMonthly-UP” plan which does not perform scheduled backups.
Requesting New Plans
We have the capability to create additional Plans to cover needs that may not be met by the above plans. However, to ensure the stability of our environment, we need to keep the number of plans relatively low, and we need to put reasonable constraints on the quantity and duration of data retention.
Note: Our environment was not designed to perform long-term storage of data for regulatory compliance or similar business needs. If you need to retain data for multiple years, we would recommend storing it on a file server or other storage device, and using the normal 31 day plans to provide a backup of that device.
If you have a strong requirement for an additional Plan, please submit a ticket, and we will work with you to create an appropriate Plan if possible.
You can read more about the available configuration parameters for Plans in our vendor’s documentation: https://documentation.commvault.com/2023e/essential/server_plans.html