Schedule and retention
Backups run once a day at a time you choose. Old backups are deleted automatically after a number of days you choose.
Change the backup time
- Open Settings.
- Set Daily backup time and Time zone. Choose a quiet time, when few people use your website, such as 02:00.
- Click Save settings.
All servers in your organization use the same time. If the server was offline at backup time, the backups start as soon as it comes back (within 24 hours).
You can start a backup any time with Back up now (one item) or Back up everything now (a whole server). Manual backups don't change the daily schedule.
How long backups are kept
In Settings, Keep backups for sets the number of days (default 7). Backups older than that are deleted from your Google Drive automatically. Your plan sets the maximum. See Pricing for each plan's limit.
The safety rule
Old backups of a database are only removed if that database also has a successful backup from the last 36 hours, and the newest good backup is always kept. So if something breaks for a week, your last good backups are still there.
Keep a backup forever
Before a big change (for example a software upgrade or a data migration), you may want a copy that is never deleted. In Google Drive, right-click the backup → Make a copy, and move the copy outside the FlashBackup folder. FlashBackup only deletes the files it created.