Overview
Retention settings, stored-flow growth, and backup requirements affect storage pressure and recovery planning.
Retention is one of the main drivers of storage growth and database pressure. Backup and restore planning also affects storage and recovery design.
Retention guidance
Keep flow retention conservative unless measured data supports a longer retention period.
Measure storage growth before changing retention.
Revisit IOPS headroom after any retention increase.
Use data management and backup controls as storage and recovery controls.
Data-growth warning signs
Rapid increase in stored flows.
Rising write IOPS.
Sustained storage growth after outages.
Component growth that approaches the alert threshold.
Backup and restore planning
Release 5.5.x appliance documentation describes Center backup and restore workflows for migration and recovery.
Plan enough free space to generate backup archives locally and move the archives to secure storage.
Restore only onto targets with matching network interface and interface mode assumptions. Licenses and report extension packages are not restored automatically.