Introduction

Data protection has become a cornerstone of modern cloud operations. As organisations move critical workloads across multiple clouds, ensuring reliable, secure, and compliant backup and recovery processes is essential. Oracle’s Autonomous Recovery Service (ARS) offers a fully managed, policy-driven approach to database protection — simplifying backup management, enhancing resilience, and ensuring long-term compliance whether your database runs in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) or in a Multicloud environment(AWS, Azure and Google).

 

Backup Retention Period

The backup retention period defines how long automatic backups remain available for recovery.

• In Autonomous Recovery Service, this period can be configured between 14 and 95 days.
• The policy is identical whether your database resides in OCI or in a Multicloud.
• For example, a policy set at 35 days ensures every associated database can be restored from any point within that window.

This consistent retention policy helps maintain uniform recovery standards across all environments.

 

Retention Lock (Backup Immutability)

Enabling Retention Lock adds another layer of protection by making backups immutable during the retention period.

• Once activated, backups cannot be modified or deleted until the retention period expires.
• The same feature and behaviour apply in both OCI and Multicloud configurations.
• This is a crucial safeguard against ransomware or accidental deletion, ensuring your data remains secure and compliant throughout its lifecycle.

For organisations governed by strict data integrity or audit requirements, Retention Lock is not just optional — it’s strongly recommended.

 

Preferred Cloud Location for Storing Backups

Autonomous Recovery Service gives you flexibility in choosing where backups are stored.

• Default option: Backups are stored in OCI.
• Multicloud option: If your database is hosted in another cloud (e.g. AWS via Oracle Database@AWS), you can choose to store backups in the same provider’s region.

For example, a database in AWS US East (N. Virginia – use1-az4) can pair with OCI US East (Ashburn) if you choose to store backups in OCI.

 

Long-Term Retention (LTR) for Multicloud Environments

Many organisations must retain backups for several years to meet regulatory or internal compliance standards (e.g. SOX, HIPAA, or internal audit policies).

Autonomous Recovery Service offers Long-Term Retention (LTR) to simplify this.

• You can keep backups for up to 10 years with a simple one-click policy.
• LTR backups are automatically stored in OCI’s Object Storage and Infrequent Access tiers, optimising costs while maintaining accessibility.
• This applies to both OCI and Multicloud databases, but it is not available for all Multicloud options:

With ARS, long-term retention becomes effortless and cost-effective, while still ensuring compliance and resilience.

An alternative for long-term backups on DB@AWS is to create manual backups and store them in OCI Object Storage, giving you full control over how long they are kept. For deployments running on Exadata Database Service, you can install the Oracle Database Backup Module  for OCI, create a standalone script (without altering any RMAN configuration), and use the keep forever option — though you need to handle this carefully to avoid disrupting your backup strategy. If you have a standby database, it’s better to run the backups there rather than on the primary, as this reduces the load on production systems, which is especially important in large environments.

Conclusion

ARS has been developed in close collaboration with Oracle AI Database and is purpose-built to deliver real-time data protection, cyber resilience and predictable recovery you can depend on.

Key benefits include:

• Ransomware resiliency: ARS enables recovery to within less than a second of an outage or attack.
• Real-time transaction protection: It supports continuous data protection and applies database-aware validation of backups, ensuring reliable point-in-time recovery.
• Management and operational efficiency: Backup, recovery and lifecycle management are fully automated, reducing administrative effort and resource usage.
• Immutability and strong security controls: Backups are encrypted, stored in a separate tenancy, and can be protected with a retention-lock policy to prevent modification or early deletion.
• Unified multi-cloud support: ARS protects Oracle databases running in OCI, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud through a single, consistent service model.
• Optimised long-term retention costs: By using the right storage tiers and off-loading backup validation from production systems, ARS helps lower total cost of ownership.
• Fast, predictable restores decrease downtime: Automated recoveries are completed quickly and consistently using virtual full backups created through an incremental-forever strategy. This avoids restoring and applying multiple incremental backups, reduces recovery time objectives and keeps recovery times predictable.
• Minimal impact on database performance: Backup validation and recovery tasks are handled by Recovery Service, freeing CPU resources on production databases and keeping workloads running efficiently.

 

In essence, Autonomous Recovery Service is a fully managed data protection service for Oracle databases running on OCI, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Unique, automated capabilities protect Oracle Database changes in real time, validate backups without production database overhead, and enable fast, predictable recovery to any point in time. Low costs based on the amount of data being protected mean that zero data loss resiliency is available to organizations of any size and virtually any budget.