Retention Period

[sudu_mlk]

Hello,

I am using veritas netbackup 5.1 on windows platform, i have some doubt's on retention,

I have set retention level of full backup schedule to 12 weeks, after this retention cycle all these data will be erased.

we are sending all media's to offsite every week, if we require any data to restore within this period we will recall these data and it is done.

but my question is if we required old data, lets assume past 5 months old data, how can we get it, how it will done.

please give some information on this.

thanks,
sudarshan.

[Darren_Dunham]

What are you doing with your tapes after the 12 weeks are up?  Do they just stay offsite or do you bring them back and reuse them?

For older data, Netbackup no longer tracks it.  So the data might be there, but NBU will not be able to tell you what tape it could be on.  You'd either have to have a record in some other form, guess (maybe based on volume sequence labels), or just import every single tape.  Since importing takes a long time, it can be prohibitive to do so on a large number of tapes.

The question is why is your retention period set to 12 weeks if you might need to restore something older than that, and what are you doing with your tapes after 12 weeks?  Most sites set a retention period so that they can reuse the tapes.  If you're not reusing the tapes, maybe you want a longer period...

--
Darren

[sudu_mlk]

Hello Darren,

Thanks!!!

I have started learning netbackup since 7 months,

After 12 weeks, these tapes are delivered to onsite and we are re-using these tape.

--
sudarshan.

[Darren_Dunham · Accepted solution]

Okay.  Normally after the retention period, the images on the tape "expire", and the tape is deassigned.  In that state, the volume is available for new backups.

If the tape is selected for backups, then the old data is erased when it gets used.  Until then, the data is still present on the tape, but there's no record in the current catalog about which tape it's on.

Besides the options I mentioned originally, if you made copies of your catalog (say as part of a vault, or for other purposes), you could examine that copy to see if the information you want was present then.  Otherwise you're stuck guessing and importing.

Does that answer your question?
--
Darren

[sudu_mlk]

Hi Darren,

Thanks for sharing your valueable information.

As am not having much knowledge on vaulting and this has not been implemented in our netbackup domain.

as you explained in above its true, we have stortage of medias and might be our netbackup designer have limited to 12 weeks of retention.

Regards,
Sudarshan.

[J_H_Is_gone]

Check what your SLA to the users is...
if your department has an SLA that says you can restore anything up to 26 weeks ago, then your retention needs to be 26 weeks at least for the once a week fulls.

So check with your system management team and see what they expect you to be able to restore, and set your retention to match.

[KHARRIS]

There are some general things that may help you depending on the type of data and the frequency of the requests.