Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
The Oracle-defined Bronze, Silver and Gold backup policies are a one-click choice, but their retention is fixed and cannot be changed: all three keep monthly backups for twelve months and a yearly backup for five years, and Silver and Gold add weekly and daily backups on top. When Gold or Silver is assigned to every volume, including development, test and scratch volumes, the tenancy keeps years of restore points that no recovery plan needs.
Two other patterns add to it. Manual backups never expire, so backups taken before upgrades or migrations accumulate until someone deletes them. And user-defined policies with cross-region copy enabled store every copied backup a second time in the destination region and add outbound data transfer, which is only justified for volumes with a cross-region disaster recovery requirement.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Backups are incremental after the first, but each retained backup keeps the blocks it needs to restore the full volume.
- Backup storage
- Billed at the Object Storage price per GB-month for every retained volume and boot volume backup
- Oracle-defined policy retention
- Fixed schedules and retention that cannot be modified, including a yearly backup retained for five years
- Manual backups
- Full or incremental backups that do not expire and are billed until deleted
- Cross-region backup copy
- Available on user-defined policies; bills backup storage in both regions plus outbound data transfer
How to detect
4 checks to find it in your estate.
- Check the backup policy assigned to each volume and boot volume (oci bv volume-backup-policy-assignment get-volume-backup-policy-asset-assignment --asset-id) and flag volumes in non-production compartments on the Oracle-defined Gold or Silver policy, or on any Oracle-defined policy where five-year yearly backups are not required
- List volume and boot volume backups (Block Volume Backups page or oci bv backup list) and filter for source type MANUAL, which have no expiration time, sorting by creation time and size to find old pre-change backups that are still billed
- Review user-defined backup policies with cross-region copy enabled and check which assigned volumes actually have a cross-region disaster recovery requirement
- Find backups whose source volume no longer exists: policy-based backups remain until they expire, which for a yearly backup under an Oracle-defined policy is five years
How to fix
5 ways to remove the waste.
- Create user-defined backup policies with retention that matches each environment's recovery objective, for example a short daily or weekly schedule for non-production, by duplicating an Oracle-defined policy and editing its schedules, then reassign volumes
- Delete manual backups that are no longer needed, and set a team rule for how long pre-change backups are kept
- Disable cross-region copy on policies whose volumes do not need a copy in another region, or split them into separate policies for DR and non-DR volumes
- Check for retention locks, deletion prevention or indefinite holds before cleanup, since these deliberately block deletion and usually reflect a compliance requirement
- Tradeoff: deleting a full backup can increase the size of the next incremental backup, because it must then hold every block needed to restore the volume, so expect savings to be less than the size of the deleted backup
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.