Catalog Rentention Period - NBU 6.5.2

[justmirsk]

Hello Everyone!

       I am fairly new to Netbackup and could use some help.  Our backups are running perfectly fine, however when we go to do a restore and search for a file or directory to restore we are only shown backups that have happened since the last full catalog backup.  I have looked through the admin guide but hav enot been able to find out if the catalog is flushed in some way when the catalog backup is run.

Our setup is as follows: 

1 Master/Media/EMM server running RHEL 5

2 additional media servers running RHEL 5

All servers and clients running Version 6.5.2

Is there a setting somewhere that specifies the amount of time to keep the backup history in the catalog?

Am I doing something wrong?

Please let me know if any further information is required.

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

Retention periods ok on your actual policies/schedules?

Windows or Java BAR GUI? Are you not seeing anything at all older than a week?

Within Host Properties/Master Server/master server/Universal Settings tab there is a 'tick-box' for "Browse timeframe for restores" & "Last full backup" but this only affects the initial browse & should not prevent you locating & restoring images older than this. e.g ours is set to 'last full' but we can still see (on the Windows BAR GUI) that images from earlier are there & can select them if necessary.

[justmirsk]

Andy - Thanks for the reply

I have what you will most likely think is a dumb question but I need to ask it.  Is the retention period what controls the image in the catalog?  I simply thought that was when the tape could be overwritten again.  We were overwriting our tapes after 4 weeks (I have since convinced the company to keep all full backups)

I believe that this would actually correspond to the retention period more than the catalog backups.  Can you shed a bit of light on the retention periods for me?  (I am going to get the admin guide out and read on them again as well)

Thanks!

[J_H_Is_gone]

justmirsk wrote:

"Is the retention period what controls the image in the catalog?  I simply thought that was when the tape could be overwritten again.  We were overwriting our tapes after 4 weeks (I have since convinced the company to keep all full backups)"

Yes you are correct but you may misunderstand the meaning.

The retention period tells Netbackup how long you want to keep the images ( your backup that you did last night).

if your retention period is set to 4 weeks.. Then at the end of that 4 weeks the image will "expire" 

Expire means - netbackup REMOVES all reference to that backup image from the catalog/EMM database.

(why keep info for a backup if you cannot restore it!)

This means that when all the images on a tape expire, the tape can now be overwritten.

Meaning that if it is over written you cannot restore the old stuff.

If the images have expired and the tape is avail - but has NOT been over written you can import the tape back into netbackup (putting the info back into the catalog/EMM database)  and you can now do a restore.

basic is - if the images has expired - all references are removed and you cannot restore from an expired image.

[justmirsk]

That makes sense.  I set it up that way and was just pulling out the last full backup of the month to be sent offsite (that was how we were doing it)

I will get our policies changed to make sure that this does not happen again.  Thanks!