Recovery Service retains protected database backups for a minimum period of 14 days and a maximum period of 95 days. Long-term retention (LTR) backups can be retained for a period ranging from 90 days to 3650 days (10 years).

Recovery Service protection policies control the length of time for which protected database backups are retained for recovery purposes. A protection policy defines the backup retention period in days.

For a protected database, Recovery Service ensures that the backups are retained for the period defined in the assigned protection policy, so that database recovery is possible to any point in time within this interval, counting backward from the current time.

For example, the Oracle-defined Silver protection policy has a predefined 35-day backup retention period. A protected database that is assigned with the Silver policy can recover from backups within the 35-day interval, counting backward from the current time.

When you create a long-term retention (LTR) backup with Recovery Service, you can choose to retain the LTR backup for the period defined in the protection policy or specify a custom long-term retention period (up to 10 years). See Create Long-Term Retention Backups with Recovery Service for detailed information.