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Another RDX DLM Question

Studio_Two
Level 4

Hello,

I have THREE RDX Cartridges in my rotation (Weekly Full / Differential) and they don't always get inserted in the correct sequence for one reason or another, but each disk contains a full backup "chain" for that particular week. To this end, our data retention is set to ONE Week, otherwise there is the possiblity that a backup won't run due to a full cartridge.

Due to this short retention period, do I run the risk of inserting a previous backup cartridge (with the intention of performing a RESTORE), and having DLM delete the very backup chain I want to use because it has expired?

Can anyone confirm if the DLM routine runs at the point the RDX cartridge is inserted into the caddy, or prior to running a backup job? I would have thought the best time to run this would be immediately before a backup takes place.

I found this information so far: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH214945

"... for RDX - Data lifecycle management only runs when a writable mount (E.g. Backup or duplicate) happens to a online inserted disk cartridge and only for the the backup sets contained on the disk cartridge."

I'm not sure what a "writable mount" means. Any help / clarification would be most appreciated.

For the moment, I will have to increase the retention period on the backup job, but this will cause problems when having to deal with holidays and absences.

*** I have had awful problems loggin in / posting to this forum recently ***

Thanks in advance, Stephen

5 REPLIES 5

Hi Colin,

Many thanks. I think that is the same article I quoted above (with a different URL). However, I'm coming to the conclusion that "writable mount" means when the "writable media is mounted" rather than when actually writing to mounted media.

In the former case, I am going to lose everything except the most recent backup as soon as I put the disk into the caddy. Hardly ideal.

Thanks again, Stephen

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Sorry but the blog entitled "Backup Set retention and expiry Handling on Removable (RDX etc) media" is not the same as the article entitled "How data lifecycle management in Backup Exec 2012 SP4 and later manages backup set retention for on disk storage(B2D) and Removable disk cartridge(RDX)."

The blog being the link I posted...

And to answer your question a writable mount is the start of a new backup set -  which requires a job to be running as the trigger (but could happen more than once in a job and not just at the start as C: D: and System State would be 3 backup sets and not 1)

 

Colin,

Please accept my apologies, I had both articles open in my browser, and quoted from one and pasted the link from the other.

Thank you for the explanation.

Kind Regards, Stephen

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

No worries

 

Of course as Backup Exec also has a setting to mark offline disk storage as Read Only once it is offline for a specified period (there are two settings one for RDX and one for standard disk and it is a server wide setting not a specific disk setting) - if worried you could also make use of this by setting your set limited to read only after specific offline period to the same as (or slightly less than) your expiry time. If you did this you would have to remember to set each cartridge back to rewritable when you do intend to use them for backups instead of restores.