Recovery Appliance uses protection policies to simplify the management of protected database backups. A protection policy is a collection of attributes that defines recovery goals and storage space requirements for one or more protected databases. A Recovery Appliance contains multiple protection policies that define varied recovery goals. Each protected database is assigned exactly one protection policy that determines how the Recovery Appliance stores and maintains backup data for that protected database.

A protection policy defines the following attributes for each protected database that is associated with the protection policy:

• A Recovery Appliance storage location for storing the protected database backups

• The recovery window goal for disk backups

• (Optional) Whether backups protected by this policy must be replicated or written to tape before being considered for deletion

• (Optional) The recovery window for tape backups

• (Optional) A backup polling policy

Protection policies enable you to group protected databases by recovery service tier. For example, tier 1 databases require backups to be retained for 14 days on disk and 30 days on tape. You create a protection policy that defines these recovery window goals and then assign it to all tier 1 protected databases.