Scheduled backups
On-demand backups cover the "I want a snapshot of this volume right now" case. Scheduled backups cover everything else: nightly backups of every production volume, weekly full backups paired with daily incrementals, monthly snapshots retained for a year for compliance.
A schedule is a small JSON document — pick a target (a volume, a VM, a database), a frequency (cron-style), a retention policy (keep N most recent, or expire after X days), and storage policy (which backup storage region/class). The scheduler runs in the background; failed runs retry with backoff and surface in the schedule's run log.
Most production accounts use 2–4 schedules: daily-keep-14, weekly-keep-8, monthly-keep-12, and occasionally a year-end snapshot kept for 7 years for finance/legal.
What's next
- Backups — the on-demand counterpart and the resource type schedules produce.
- Block storage and Snapshots — the backup sources.
- Managed databases — has its own retention model; doesn't use schedules from this endpoint.