Overdue payment causes, service suspension timeline, and data retention policies for Cloud Backup-Cloud Backup(Cloud Backup)-阿里云帮助中心

An overdue payment occurs when your Cloud Backup usage exceeds your resource plan quota or account balance. Overdue payments can lead to service suspension and data deletion.

Warning

Overdue payments risk service suspension. Top up your account promptly to avoid disruptions.

Reasons for overdue payments

An overdue payment for Cloud Backup occurs in the following situations:

Your usage exceeds the resource plan quota, and your account balance is insufficient to cover the excess.
No resource plan covers the service costs, and your account balance is insufficient.

Service status after an overdue payment

The following table describes the service status at each stage of an overdue payment.

Overdue period	Description
Within the service suspension protection period	Cloud Backup remains available. Top up your account during this period to prevent service suspension. Note Alibaba Cloud provides service suspension protection that allows continued use of pay-as-you-go services for a limited period or amount after a payment becomes overdue. Normal billing continues during the protection period. The protection quota does not cap the total overdue amount. The quota or period is automatically recalculated each month based on historical spending. For more information, see Service suspension protection.
Within 15 days after service suspension	After the overdue payment exceeds the service suspension protection quota, all Cloud Backup tasks, including backups, archiving, and data replication, stop. Backup data is retained but cannot be used for recovery. Billing for backup software and storage space also stops. Top up your account during this period to automatically resume Cloud Backup.
More than 15 days after service suspension	Alibaba Cloud considers the service voluntarily discontinued, terminates the Cloud Backup service agreement, and deletes all stored data. Deleted data cannot be recovered. Billing stops before the data is deleted. Important If the overdue payment is not settled (account balance remains below 0) within 15 days after service suspension, all data stored in Cloud Backup is permanently deleted. This applies regardless of whether a resource plan is active.

VMware virtual machine migration

Overdue payments cause VMware virtual machine migration tasks to fail. The migration feature is unavailable while a payment is overdue. Top up your account before restarting a migration. ECS instances created from a migration follow the same overdue payment rules as regular ECS instances.