A new class of Protection has been created in NSS 8.1. It allows computers to be restored and have their health monitored, but assumes protection (policy management) is handled outside of NSS.
The term “unmanaged” refers to NetBackup Self Service not managing the policy coverage for the computer. These “monitor and restore” computers have a protection type code assigned like any other. However, its primary purpose is to define the SLA for backup health determination. Flexibility is also provided to detect only the backups that are made with certain policies or all, for health measurement.
This new feature is aimed at customers who do not want NSS to ‘manage’ their policies but do want to offer users the ability to perform restores. Previously NSS 8.1 could be configured to provide restore only for polices it did not manage, however all machines would appear as 'unprotected' which was confusing to users, so the 'Unmanaged' protection was added which can be applied to these machines, they then appear 'protected', furthermore a level of their health is monitored as you can set a check to make sure a backup has been completed recently (you set the threshold time).
If you are using a mixture of managed (NSS managed policies) and Unmanaged (polices managed outside NSS) machines, the recommended best practice for using the new Unmanaged functionality is to create separate Protection Type’s for managed and unmanaged machines and not to mix Unmanaged and managed Protection Levels in the same Protection Type.
Following the adoption of this new functionality in NSS 8.1 the utilisation information displayed in NSS no longer includes information for unmanaged backups unless you add an unmanaged protection level to them. The utilisation information is worked out on a daily incremental schedule and rolled up into the graphs/columns, So previously unmanaged backups were counted, and the records for the unmanaged backups still exist in the tables, but are not being counted as part of the totals.. If you want to apply the new status to historical data engage Professional Services who can apply a script to update this information.
