Concept

Protection Patterns

The backup policy that controls which workloads are protected, backup schedule, retention, secondary copies, immutability use, and EBA repository selection.

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Definition

A protection pattern is the Sendense backup policy that defines how selected workloads are protected. It tells SHA which workloads to protect, where their recovery points are stored in EBA, how often backups run, and how long recovery points are retained.

Which workloads are protected and which primary EBA repository stores their recovery points.
The base backup schedule, usually hourly or daily, with optional backup windows and retry behavior.
Retention tiers and selection rules, such as keeping the first successful backup in a retention period.
Whether manual full, true full, or synthetic full operations are available.
Whether application-aware backup, indexing, checksum validation, or validation evidence is enabled.
Whether secondary copies are created, where they go, when they are copied, and how long they are retained.
Whether primary or secondary backups use repository immutability, and whether governance or compliance mode applies where supported.

Schedule And Backup Windows

Base schedule

The normal cadence for backup attempts, usually hourly or daily.

Active window

When a schedule is allowed to run.

Backup window

The period after a scheduled time where Sendense may retry.

Retry attempts

Repeated attempts within the backup window when a first attempt cannot run.

Jitter

Optional spreading of start times to reduce collision with platform activity.

Cadence, not a clock guarantee

The pattern defines the target cadence. Actual completion depends on workload size, platform availability, queue state, SNA availability, repository health, and other active operations.

Retention Model

Protection patterns define how many recovery points to keep at each retention tier: base for the shortest-term rolling set of recent backups, then daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly counts.

For EBA-backed protection, retention tiers can use anchor times so recovery points are classified consistently for each tier.

If a period does not produce a successful backup within the configured retry window, Sendense can use a previous successful backup to satisfy the intended tier where configured.

Immutability, Legal Hold, And Deletion

Immutability is enabled and governed at the repository level. The protection pattern decides whether its backups use it and whether governance or compliance mode applies where available.

Legal hold is configured on the EBA repository, not on the pattern, and prevents affected recovery points from being deleted until the hold is released.

Retention marks recovery points as expired when the pattern no longer retains them. Immutability, legal hold, and dependency checks can block or delay deletion, and EBA cleanup reclaims storage only when data is no longer referenced by retained recovery points.

Secondary Copies

Protection patterns can create policy-driven secondary copies of recovery points in another EBA repository. In the GUI this can appear as offsite copy behavior.

Choose the destination EBA repository.
Copy immediately after backup completion, or after a recovery point reaches a configured age.
Retain copies to mirror the primary copy, or with an independent fixed or tiered policy.
Optionally apply immutability to the copied recovery points.
Optionally delete the source copy after a successful copy, where configured and safe.

Not DR replicas

Secondary copies are additional recovery-point placement. Disaster-recovery replicas and failover belong to replication patterns.

How Backups Move

The pattern chooses what is protected and when. SNA acts as the backup proxy and runs EBA-ST, which is always used to move protected data toward SHA and EBA. Completed backups become recovery points in the selected repository.

On supported CloudStack KVM hosts, snagent can supply an extent map when the configured storage backend is QCOW NFS, ZFS, or LINSTOR DRBD, so EBA-ST sends only the changed blocks while EBA still deduplicates blocks it already has. When that path is not available, or the backend is RAW Block, Sendense CBT is used through EBA-ST.

What A Pattern Is Not

Not the EBA repository itself. The repository provides storage, deduplication, immutability capability, legal-hold enforcement, and cleanup; the pattern decides how workloads use it.
Not a disaster-recovery replication policy. That role belongs to replication patterns.
Not the SNA backup proxy or the snagent host agent.
Not a guarantee that every scheduled backup completes at the exact scheduled minute.
Not able to override repository immutability or legal hold.