Policy Retention

[H_Sharma]

Hi Experts,

we take full backup of 1 policy monthly and cumulative daily. Suppose today I take full backup and till next 30 days i take cumulative backup and due to some reason i could not take full backup in next schedule so what will happen in that case as till the time old full backup must have expired as it has only 1 month retention?

Thanks,

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

Not a good idea to only have one full once a month and make the retention 30 days!! 

Either do Full backup every 2 weeks or make retention of monthly full 2 months or longer.

Ensure there are always at least 2 Full backups that can be used as a base for Incrementals.

Most of our customers keep Monthly backups for 6 months or a year.

Without a Full backup as basis for Incr, the Incrementals will backup everything (similar to a Full).

See the picture in this post: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/difference-between-incremental-and-differential-back#...

[revarooo · Accepted solution]

If the full had expired, the cumulative incremental will just backup all the files regardless.

Why would you not be able to take a full backup? If you can take an incremental you can take a full.

[watsons]

There are a few options, but you must do it before the "last full backup" expires:

1) Extent the retention of last full backup by setting the expiration date to a future date:

bpexpdate -backupid <backupID>  -d <mm/dd/yyyy HH:MM:SS>

2) Create a synthetic full backup schedule, and run the synthetic, what it does is consolidate your last full backup with the cumulative incremental you have and make a new "full backup". The operation happens only on the master server and does not involve the client host. Of course you will need to set the retention period of this synthetic full to be longer than the original full backup.