Situation

You would like to have a safety net to protect your backups from wrong deletions and manipulation errors.


Immutable storage allows you to access deleted backups during a specified retention period. You can recover the content of these backups, but you cannot change the backup files or move them back to their original storage. When the retention period ends, the backups in immutable storage are permanently deleted.

Prerequisites

  • Two-factor authentication must be enabled in Acronis
  • Only TIBX (Version 12) backups are supported.

Enabling immutable storage

  1. Log in to the Cyber Protection service console as a company administrator.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Settings > System settings.
  3. Scroll the list of default backups options, and then click Immutable Storage.
  4. Enable the Immutable storage switch.
  5. Specify the desired retention period within the range of 1 to 999 days.


The default retention period is 14 days. A longer retention period may result in increased storage usage.


To make your existing backups support immutable storage, update them by running their protection plans.


After the backup operation completes, when you delete a backup, it will still be accessible during the retention period of immutable storage, instead of being erased permanently.


As a result, you will be able to recover data from deleted backups that are within the specified retention period.


Warning! 

If you delete a backup without updating it after immutable storage is enabled, the backup will be erased permanently.

Disabling immutable storage

  1. Log in to the Cyber Protection service console as a company administrator.
  2. In the navigation menu, click Settings > System settings.
  3. Scroll the list of default backups options, and then click Immutable Storage.
  4. Disable the Immutable storage switch.

Warning! 

If you disable immutable storage, all deleted backups will be permanently erased. Deleting new backups will also be permanent.

Note: Disabling Immutable Storage activates a grace period that lasts for 14 days by default. During this grace period, Immutable Storage will still work, with the same retention period that was set at the moment Immutable Storage was disabled. After the grace period has ended, Immutable Storage will be fully disabled and all data protected by it will be removed from storage.

Accessing the backups in immutable storage


Backups in the immutable storage can be accessed via the Backup Storage tab using the option Show deleted. It is not possible to "undelete" the backup itself, but you can browse backups in the immutable storage and recover data from them (both disk/partitions and files/folders).

Keywords

Acronis, Online Backup, Immutable Storage, Backups