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Retention of weekly backup point

Jonathan Potthast 0 Reputation points
2026-04-07T17:50:49.0266667+00:00

I changed my "Retention of weekly backup point" from 52 weeks to 12 weeks, but I did not realize this would cause my EXISTING prior backups of 13 weeks ago and older to be immediately deleted! How to recover them??? I also ADDED "Retention of monthly backup point" for 36 months, but this did not keep 1 past weekly backup snapshot per month. Why is it not keeping the weekly ones on a monthly basis? It's an emergency I MUST be able to recover backups saved during October 2025 for \beancloud.file.core.windows.net\beanc and also \beancloud.file.core.windows.net\taxes

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  1. Siva shunmugam Nadessin 7,735 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-04-07T21:02:01.1566667+00:00

    Hello Jonathan Potthast,

    Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A forum. 

    When investigated we see that what happened is exactly how the long-term retention (LTR) policies work today:

    1. When you reduced your “Weekly backup retention” from 52 to 12 weeks, any backups older than 12 weeks were immediately marked as expired and purged.
    2. The “Monthly backup retention” setting in LTR always keeps only the first full backup of each month (up to your specified number of months). It does not automatically pick one of the weekly backups taken later in the month. Because you didn’t have a full backup taken at the start of each month under the new policy, there was nothing for it to retain.

    Unfortunately, once an LTR backup passes its expiration date it’s permanently deleted and can’t be restored. You’ll only be able to recover data from backups that are still within your 12-week (weekly) or 36-month (monthly, first-of-month) window.

    To avoid this in the future, a common pattern is:

    • Set Monthly retention before you shorten Weekly retention • Make sure you let at least one full backup occur right after the first of the month (so the monthly policy has a “first-of-month” backup to retain) • Then safely reduce your weekly window without losing your monthlies

    Hope that clears it up!

    Reference docs:

    • Manage long-term backup retention for your database https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/sql-database/sql-database-long-term-backup-retention?WT.mc_id=pid:13491:sid:32630432

    • Configure weekly/monthly LTR policies https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/azure-sql/database/long-term-backup-retention-configure?WT.mc_id=pid:13491:sid:32630432/

    • LTR settings explained (W/M/Y/WeekOfYear) https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/backup/backup-azure-backup-cloud-as-tape?wt.mc_id=knowledgesearch_inproduct_azure-cxp-community-insider#what-is-the-retention-policy

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