how can access to a restore point

Hey Babak,

The retention period you set for the journal is the furthest time back that you’ll have checkpoints available to restore to.  Keep in mind – Zerto replicates every few seconds and stores a checkpoint.  For example, let’s say your RPO is between 5-10 seconds.  This means Zerto is storing a checkpoint every 5-10 seconds ( you can see avg. RPO in the dashboard).  So every hour, Zerto will store between 360-720 points in time to which you can recover to.

IMPORTANT – the journal has a maximum retention period of up to 30 days!  You can configure the history for 1hr all the way up to 30 days depending on your business’ requirements & available resources.

So to answer your questions:

1. No – a journal history of 1hr means that the furthest back you’ll be able to recover that VM/app is 1 hour.  You will still have checkpoints every few seconds so if something happens at 12:00:00 pm you will likely have a checkpoint around 11:59:50-11:59:55
2. Yes – it is possible to utilize a restore point from 2 hours ago.  You just need to configure the journal history to be that long.  Zerto will phase out old checkpoints and replace them with new ones as time goes on.

By the way – most of our customers have the journal configured for at least a week.  A lot of them like to use the full 30 days so they can start using Zerto for some backup use cases like file-level recovery and ransomware mitigation.

I hope this information helps