Manual Snapshots are now auto-deleted after 6 months unless you mark them as Protected

Hi there,

We observed a while back that there was no easy way for our users to get an overview of all the snapshots they had made themselves of their servers, without having to check each server individually (which was a cumbersome process with lots of clicks). That's why we created the All Manual Snapshots overview in the Webdock dashboard (All Servers -> Your Snapshots) so you could easily see a list of all the snapshots you had created. The other reason we wanted to create this new screen was to facilitate the feature which has just gone live today: Automatic cleanup of old Manual Snapshots.

What we were seeing was that we had users who had really REALLY old snapshots lying around in their accounts. Now, we offer a lot of free snapshot/backup space, but this is still resources on our infrastructure which costs money and we need to maintain. For this reason, to ensure that we are not maintaining data which is not needed anymore and is just taking up space, we have now implemented automatic deletion of any user snapshot older than 6 months, unless you mark the snapshot as Protected.

How to mark snapshots as Protected and avoid auto deletion:

You can mark any of your own snapshots as Protected on the aforementioned All Manual Snapshots screen or on the Snapshots screen for any individual server. Simply click the red shield icon and it will update the page and the icon will be marked in green and now your snapshot is Protected.

On the All Manual Snapshots screen we also show the date when any snapshot will be deleted and explicitly state whether it's protected or not.

You can only Protect as many Snapshots as you have servers, or 1 Protected Snapshot per server

In order to limit this functionality in a sane way we have set a limit as to how many snapshots you can protect. You can protect a single Manual Snapshots per server you have with us. This limit is global, meaning if you have many servers with us you can protect many snapshots for a single server or just one snapshot per server, whichever you prefer.

You will be warned by email 1 week before a snapshot auto-deletion happens

About 7 days before any snapshot is deleted, you will receive an email notification from us telling you which snapshot is about to be auto-deleted and on which date. This should give you ample time to react and mark the snapshot as Protected if you want to keep it.

We will send the first batch of notifications for all snapshots on our platform older than 6 months later today

You can expect to receive a seperate email today if you have old snapshots in your account which will notify you of this auto-deletion. We will start auto-deleting snapshots in 1 week or on July 13th

If you have any questions in this regard please reach out to our support team.

Best regards

Your Webdock Team