How to change the retention period for good/bad news alerts in CodeTwo Backup

Problem:

You would like to increase or decrease the time over which good news and bad news alerts are stored in the CodeTwo Backup log files and displayed in the program’s Administration Panel.

Solution:

The period over which alerts are stored is controlled by three parameters:

• GoodNewsRetentionDays controls how much time will have to pass before a good news alert is deleted. By default, good news alerts are stored for a period of 30 days and then they are removed.
• BadNewsRetentionDays controls the retention period for bad news alerts. By default, these alerts have an indefinite retention period, which means they are not removed automatically based on their age.
• MaxAlertCyclesCount can be used to limit the number of alerts generated per job cycle (i.e. a completed Exchange/SharePoint backup or restore job). For example, if a program cannot access a given mailbox in consecutive backup cycles, it will generate a one-time alert for each cycle. When the maximum number of alerts is reached, the oldest occurrence of the alert will be removed. The cycle limit applies both to good news and bad news alerts.

Learn more about the alerts in CodeTwo Backup

You can modify these parameters individually or in combination to create an alert logging policy or to effectively reduce the number of displayed alerts. Follow the instructions below to get started:

1. If the program is running, stop all jobs, close the Administration Panel and stop the CodeTwo Backup Service in the Windows Services Manager.

2. Open the folder where CodeTwo Backup is installed. The default path is:

   C:\Program Files\CodeTwo\CodeTwo Backup

3. Find the CodeTwoBackup.Engine.Service.exe.config file and, as a precaution, create a copy of this file in another location before you start editing it.
4. Open the original file using a text editor such as Notepad.
5. Find and edit the following parameters:

   GoodNewsRetentionDays

   and

   BadNewsRetentionDays

   to change the number of days over which good and bad news alerts (respectively) are stored. The minimum value is 1 (day). Alerts will be removed automatically when the set time has passed. If any of the parameters’ value is set to zero (0), the retention will not be active for a given news type, and alerts will not be removed automatically.

6. Next, find and edit the following parameter:

   MaxAlertCyclesCount

   to change the number of cycles after which older cyclical alarms are deleted. The minimum value is 1 (cycle). If the parameter value is set to zero (0), alerts will not be removed automatically.

7. Save changes and close the file.
8. Restart the CodeTwo Backup Service in the Windows Services Manager.

If you had some alerts that were not removed based on the previous settings, they will be removed in the next program cycle if they are older than the new retention period allows or if they exceed the new maximum cycle count.

See also:

• Learn how to use the alert retention feature and other methods to resolve program responsivity issues