How Long Should You Keep Backups? KVKK/GDPR Rules vs Real Storage Costs

Why the Question “How Long Should We Keep Backups?” Really Matters

When we talk with customers planning a new hosting setup or consolidating servers, one of the first questions is no longer “How often should we back up?” but “For how long should we keep those backups?” On one side, IT and business teams want long retention: old versions, audit trails, the comfort of knowing “it will be somewhere in a backup.” On the other side, legal teams remind everyone about KVKK/GDPR obligations, and finance points to growing storage bills, especially for large databases, media libraries and mailboxes.

Keeping everything forever is no longer safe or cheap. Under KVKK and GDPR you have strict principles like storage limitation and data minimisation. At the same time, NVMe disks and fast backup storage are not free, and large backup chains make restores slower and more complex. In this article, we will walk through how to decide realistic backup retention periods for websites, email, SaaS apps and logs, so that you stay compliant with KVKK/GDPR while keeping storage and operational complexity under control. We will focus on what you can practically implement on shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers and colocation environments at dchost.com.

The Legal Baseline: What KVKK and GDPR Say About Retention

Both KVKK (Turkey’s personal data law) and GDPR (EU) do not give you a magic number like “keep backups for 90 days.” Instead, they introduce principles and rights that indirectly shape your backup retention strategy. The two most important are:

• Storage limitation: Personal data must be kept no longer than necessary for the purposes for which it is processed.
• Data minimisation: You should not keep more data (and copies of that data) than you really need.

On top of that, you have data subject rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection). These rights also apply, in a nuanced way, to data that lives inside your backup systems. Regulators expect you to be able to:

• Explain how long you keep personal data in active systems and in backups.
• Show that you have a retention schedule and that you actually follow it.
• Ensure that data is not restored indefinitely after the primary copy has been deleted under a legal basis such as the right to be forgotten.

Sector-specific rules may further constrain you. For example, accounting regulations can require keeping financial records for 5–10 years; labour laws dictate how long you keep HR data; tax authorities define their own retention periods. These legal minimums sometimes force you to keep certain categories of data much longer than you would from a pure IT perspective.

We covered how these principles affect log files and mail headers in more detail in our article on log retention on hosting and email infrastructure for KVKK/GDPR compliance. The same logic applies to backups: you must be able to justify your retention periods in relation to purpose, law and risk.

Backups vs. Active Data: A Subtle but Important Distinction

Most data protection authorities accept that backups are a separate processing context from your active production systems. In practice, that usually means:

• You do not edit individual records inside existing backup sets when a user exercises their right to deletion.
• Instead, you ensure that personal data is removed from active systems, and that old data is not kept in backups beyond a defined retention window.
• If you restore an old backup for disaster recovery, you must re-apply deletions or retention rules in a reasonable time.

This is why infinite retention is so problematic: if you can always resurrect very old personal data from outdated backups, your storage limitation principle is effectively broken.

From Law to Practice: How to Turn Principles into Backup Rules

Compliance language is one thing; making it work on your hosting or servers is another. Let’s translate these principles into concrete steps you can implement with your current infrastructure.

1. Classify Your Data by Purpose and Sensitivity

Start by mapping what you actually store and back up. A simple, pragmatic classification could be:

• Business-critical & personal: Customer accounts, orders, invoices, support tickets, medical/financial data where applicable.
• Business-critical & mostly non-personal: Product catalogues, blog posts, configuration, code repositories.
• High-volume but low-value personal data: Old marketing lists, tracking identifiers, dormant accounts.
• Technical and security logs: Web server logs, email logs, access logs, security events.

For each category, ask two questions:

1. Why do we keep this data (legal basis and business purpose)?
2. For how long do we realistically need to be able to restore it from backups?

2. Connect Retention with RPO/RTO

Backup retention is not just a legal topic; it also affects your RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) – in plain language: how much data you can afford to lose and how quickly you need to be back online. If you have not yet defined those targets, it is worth reading our guide on how to design a backup strategy around RPO/RTO for blogs, e‑commerce and SaaS sites.

Once RPO/RTO are defined, you can align them with retention like this:

• Short RPO + Long retention: more frequent backups, kept for longer – highest cost.
• Long RPO + Short retention: less frequent backups, shorter history – cheaper, but larger risk window.
• Mixed: frequent short-term backups (e.g. 7–30 days) plus rare long-term archives (e.g. monthly for 12–36 months).

3. Build a Simple Retention Matrix

A practical way we often use with customers is a simple matrix that combines system type, frequency and retention window. For example:

• Production database (customers/orders): Daily backups, kept for 90 days; monthly backups kept for 3–5 years.
• Website code and assets: Weekly backups, kept for 90–180 days.
• Email accounts: Daily or weekly, kept for 180–365 days, considering legal and HR/tax needs.
• Logs: Detailed logs for 30–90 days, summarized/anonymised logs for 1–2 years if needed for security or compliance.

This matrix becomes the heart of your backup and retention policy. You should be able to show it to auditors and explain how it reflects KVKK/GDPR principles plus sector obligations.

So, How Long Should You Actually Keep Backups?

There is no one-size answer, but there are ranges that make sense in most hosting scenarios. Below we focus on typical setups we see at dchost.com: websites on shared hosting, VPS-based applications, dedicated servers and colocation deployments.

Websites and Databases (CMS, E‑commerce, Corporate Sites)

For a typical WordPress, WooCommerce, Laravel or custom PHP application with customer accounts and orders, a common pattern is:

• Short-term backups: Daily (or even hourly for high-traffic stores) kept for 7–30 days. These handle operational mistakes: plugin issues, content deletions, minor hacks.
• Medium-term backups: Weekly full or synthetic full backups kept for 60–180 days. This covers late-discovered bugs, security incidents and extended debugging.
• Long-term archives: Monthly backups kept for 1–3 years, especially if the database includes financial records or contracts that must be stored for legal reasons.

If your site processes special categories of personal data (health, religion, political opinions, etc.), you should be extra conservative: minimise both the volume and the retention period, and talk to legal counsel about whether you really need long-term archives at all.

Email Data

Email is tricky because it often contains many types of personal data mixed together, plus attachments with contracts, IDs, and sensitive documents. Some organisations choose to archive email centrally for legal discovery and compliance; others rely on normal mailbox backups only.

• For standard mailbox backups on hosting or VPS, a retention of 90–365 days is common.
• Where sector rules require long-term preservation (e.g. finance), you might need 5–10 years of email archives stored in a separate, tightly controlled system.

Whatever you choose, document it clearly so you can justify why old emails are still present in backups or archives. Also ensure that departing employees’ mailboxes are handled according to HR, privacy and labour law requirements.

Application and Security Logs

Logs are essential for security investigations and performance troubleshooting, but they can easily become a KVKK/GDPR risk if you store IP addresses and identifiers for many years without a good reason. As a starting point:

• Detailed logs: 30–90 days retention is usually enough for operational and security purposes.
• Aggregated/anonymised logs: You can keep longer (6–24 months) if you need them for capacity planning, fraud analysis or compliance, provided that individuals are no longer identifiable.

Again, our dedicated article on log retention under KVKK/GDPR dives deeper into these trade-offs.

SaaS and Multi‑Tenant Applications

If you run a SaaS platform on a VPS or dedicated server, you carry extra responsibility. Your customers may be subject to KVKK/GDPR too, and they will expect contractual clarity on your backup and retention practices. For multi-tenant databases, a common approach is:

• Frequent backups (daily/hourly) with 30–90 days retention per tenant as a baseline.
• Optional extended retention (e.g. monthly backups for 12–36 months) as an extra service, aligned with the tenant’s legal obligations.

We covered the SaaS angle in detail in our article on backup and data retention best practices for SaaS apps. Whatever you decide, write it into your Data Processing Agreements and terms of service.

System Images and Snapshots

For VPS and dedicated servers, image-level backups or hypervisor snapshots are extremely convenient, but they are also storage hungry. A pragmatic rule of thumb is:

• Keep 2–4 recent snapshots (e.g. daily for the last few days) for quick rollback after updates.
• Do not rely on snapshots as your only long-term backup. Instead, export full backups or file-level archives that you can move to cheaper storage tiers.

Snapshots are best treated as short-lived safety nets, not as an archive strategy.

Balancing Retention and Storage Cost: Practical Levers

Once you have roughly defined how long you want to keep backups, the next question is “Can we afford it?” Here are the main levers we see customers use on our hosting, VPS, dedicated and colocation platforms.

Adopt the 3‑2‑1 Backup Strategy (But Tune Retention Per Layer)

The classic 3‑2‑1 rule says: keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media, with 1 copy offsite. What many teams overlook is that each layer can have a different retention window. For example:

• Primary hosting backups (same server or same data center): Short retention (7–30 days) for fast restores.
• Secondary backups (separate storage or separate node): Medium retention (30–180 days).
• Offsite backups (another region or provider): Longer retention (6–36 months) but with lower backup frequency (weekly/monthly).

If you are new to 3‑2‑1, our guide on the 3‑2‑1 backup strategy and how to automate it on cPanel, Plesk and VPS walks through concrete setups you can run on dchost.com infrastructure.

Use Incremental and Deduplicated Backups

Full backups every day are simple but expensive. Modern backup tools support incremental (only changes since the last run) and deduplication (storing identical data only once) to drastically reduce storage usage. Typical pattern:

• One full backup per week or month.
• Daily incrementals in between.
• Retention policy expressed at backup set level (e.g. keep 4 weekly fulls + 12 monthly fulls).

This approach keeps restore times reasonable while lowering storage bills enough to comfortably justify a legally safe retention period.

Tier Your Storage

Not every backup needs to live on the fastest NVMe storage. You can separate:

• Hot backups: Recent copies on fast disks, for operational restores.
• Warm backups: Medium-term copies on slower but cheaper storage.
• Cold archives: Long-term, rarely accessed backups on very cost-effective storage (e.g. object storage with infrequent access tiers).

On dedicated servers or colocation, we often see a mix of internal disks for hot backups plus external or object storage for warm/cold layers. Our article on offsite backups to S3-compatible storage with tools like Restic or Borg shows how to combine encryption, versioning and retention in a cost-efficient way.

Automate Retention and Deletion

The biggest compliance mistake is defining a nice retention policy on paper but never implementing automated deletion. Make sure that:

• Your backup software has retention policies configured (keep last N backups, or keep until date X).
• Old backup sets are actually pruned, not just marked “expired.”
• You have logs or reports showing that deletion jobs ran successfully – useful in audits or investigations.

On shared hosting and control panels like cPanel/DirectAdmin, that usually means configuring backup rotations in the panel itself. On VPS, dedicated and colocation systems, you might use cron jobs plus backup tools to automatically expire old backups on remote storage.

Designing a KVKK/GDPR‑Aware Backup Policy with dchost.com

Let’s put this together into a concrete step-by-step process you can use on our hosting, VPS, dedicated server or colocation services.

Step 1: Inventory Systems and Data

List all systems we host for you: websites, APIs, databases, mail servers, CRM/ERP, SaaS platforms. For each, identify what personal data it holds and which legal/regulatory rules apply. If you operate in multiple regions, also think about data localisation requirements, as discussed in our guide on choosing KVKK and GDPR-compliant hosting across Turkey, EU and US data centers.

Step 2: Define RPO/RTO and Risk Appetite

For each system, decide how much data you can lose (RPO) and how fast you must recover (RTO). Critical revenue-generating systems (e‑commerce, SaaS production) will get shorter RPO/RTO and usually longer retention; internal test systems can have relaxed settings and shorter retention.

Step 3: Choose Frequency and Retention per System

Translate legal and business needs into concrete numbers. For example:

• Public corporate site with contact form only: Daily backups, keep for 30–60 days. Old inquiry records in the database anonymised or deleted based on your privacy policy.
• E‑commerce store: Hourly database backups kept for 7 days, daily full backups kept for 90 days, monthly backups archived for 5 years (aligned with accounting rules).
• Internal HR portal: Daily backups kept for 90–180 days; long-term retention driven by labour law and HR policies, potentially 5–10 years for key records.

Step 4: Implement on Your Hosting/VPS/Dedicated or Colocation Setup

Depending on which dchost.com service you use, implementation details change, but the logic stays the same:

• Shared hosting: Enable automatic backups in the control panel, choose realistic rotation (e.g. daily 14, weekly 4, monthly 3) and periodically download critical backups offsite.
• VPS/dedicated: Use native tools (e.g. database dumps, filesystem snapshots, Restic/Borg) to push encrypted backups to a separate VPS, object storage or external system with explicit retention rules.
• Colocation: Combine your own backup appliances or software with separate backup storage or S3-compatible systems, and ensure physical separation from the primary servers.

Whatever your architecture, keep at least one copy in a different failure domain (different server, rack, or data center) and enforce retention at that layer as well.

Step 5: Document and Communicate

Your backup retention policy should not live only in administrators’ heads. Document:

• Which systems are backed up, how often, and where.
• Retention periods for each category of data.
• Who has access to backups and who can initiate restores.
• How you handle data subject rights in relation to backups (e.g. “no individual record edits inside backups; data disappears as backups age out”).

Include key points in your privacy notice and Data Processing Agreements so customers understand what happens to their data in backups.

Governance, Cleanup and Regular Review

Backup retention policy is not “set and forget.” Regulations, storage prices and your own business needs change over time.

Run Periodic Cleanup Campaigns

Even with automated pruning, old backup silos can accumulate: legacy servers, experimental environments, forgotten archives on external drives. At least annually, run a cleanup:

• List all backup locations (local disks, remote storage, tapes, third‑party services).
• Delete backups that are beyond their retention period and have no remaining legal basis.
• Document what you deleted and why, in case of future questions.

Test Restores and Disaster Recovery

Legal compliance is wasted if the backups cannot be restored when you need them. Periodically test that you can:

• Restore a database or file set from different points in time.
• Spin up a new VPS or server from backup if a node fails completely.
• Honour deletion requests after restoring (e.g. re-synchronising with the current production state).

Successful restore tests also give you evidence for auditors that your backup and retention processes are not theoretical.

Conclusion: Find Your Sweet Spot and Review It Regularly

“How long should we keep backups?” has no universal magic number, but there is always a sensible sweet spot for your specific stack and obligations. KVKK/GDPR principles push you away from “keep everything forever” and toward justified, documented retention windows. Storage costs and operational complexity push you away from overly aggressive “keep every hourly backup for five years” policies. Somewhere between these two extremes lies a balanced, defensible setup.

A good starting point is to classify your systems, connect them with RPO/RTO targets, design a layered 3‑2‑1 structure and enforce retention automatically at each layer. Use cheaper storage tiers and incremental, deduplicated backups so that compliance does not break your budget. If you need a deeper dive into planning, our articles on backup strategy and RPO/RTO, 3‑2‑1 backups and offsite encrypted backups can help.

If you are planning a new hosting setup or want to redesign your backup and retention policy on existing shared hosting, VPS, dedicated servers or colocation at dchost.com, our team can help you map legal requirements to concrete backup schedules and storage plans. The safest time to fix your backup strategy is before you need those backups – and aligning with KVKK/GDPR while keeping costs under control is absolutely achievable with the right design.