Ransomware attacks are increasingly sophisticated, having the capability of watching for cloud account credentials, deleting backups and cloud storage, then encrypting everything and demanding a ransom. It’s imperative to build defenses against this escalating attack. SMBs and large businesses need a backup target that allows them to lock backups for a designated time period. Many of the major cloud providers now support object locking, also referred to as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) storage or immutable storage. Users can mark objects as locked for a designated period of time, preventing them from being deleted or altered by any user.

Backups made to a Alibaba Object Storage Service bucket with a retention period are immutable backups, with a retention period that prevents deletion by anyone accessing the bucket.

Note that customers are responsible for keeping track of the retention period and modifying it accordingly to ensure all of the backups inside the bucket continue to be marked as immutable backups.

Retrospect Backup makes it easy to back up to Alibaba Object Storage Service. Let’s walk through the steps for creating a bucket with a Bucket Lock retention policy.

Every backup within the retention period is an immutable backup with point-in-time restore capabilities. Because each backup is incremental, Retrospect only transfers the files that are new or have changed since the last backup. However, you can always restore any part of a backup in Retrospect.

Alibaba Object Storage Service will mark every new backup file with the specified retention policy, protecting your backups from any accidental or malicious deletion. However, you are responsible for ensuring none of the backup files fall out of the retention period, as Alibaba Object Storage Service does not provide the ability to change individual file’s retention periods.