Retention Period

[H_Sharma]

Hi Experts,

Environment is as below.

win 2008 Server with Master 7.6

We have 100 policies having retention period of 1 month so we were told to make the retetion periord to 1 year. So i was trying to take the full backup of each policy with one year reteion period and make it again 1 month.

I have changed one policy which has 1 month retention period and now its running So i am stuck now.

1:- I did not enable the allow multiple retention per media in master properties. My question is if I dont enable this option what would be the error?

    I believe it wont mix the retention period. So Do i need free tapes?

2:- we have clustered enviornment i ran nbpemreq -suspend_scheduling command before doing that but still i could see many new jobs are being queued there. What is the reason?

3:- What should i do to save the tape space. What would happen if we mix up the retion period?

Pls help.

[INT_RND]

1. You will have month tapes and year tapes. This is for offsite management. You don't want monthly images on a tape that is going offsite for a year. You also don't want year images on a tape that will come back onsite in one month.

2. User directed backups and manual backups will still run. The queue will continue to run. NBPEM calculates the next jobs that are needed to run and compares them with start windows. It contains the next few jobs scheduled to run. It might take a few minutes for the scheduling to actually stop. Hard to tell without seeing what you are talking about.

3. You can mix retention if you aren't worried about tape storage. You can also change the retention of old images. Depends on what your business needs are. 

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Hello,

Your description of your requirement is a bit confusing. You said "We have 100 policies having retention period of 1 month so we were told to make the retetion periord to 1 year. So i was trying to take the full backup of each policy with one year reteion period and make it again 1 month."

What is going on here? Do you need 1 month or 1 year?

Usually you should have a different retention levels for different schedules. Lets assume your Daily schedule had a retention of one month. If management wanted a backup taken that last for 1 year as a once off, you could create another schedule called runonce and give it a retention period of 1 year.

I'm sure you did not want to change all your 100 backup policies to change from 1 month (30 days) to 1 year retention (365 days). This would require 12 as many tapes.

To answer your questions

1. Yes, if you don't have additional free tapes you'll probably get 96 errors, Its difficult to say without knowing more.
2. If you change anything on a policy, nbpem will only check every 10 minutes. You can run nbpemreq -updatepolicies to force it to reread the config. Your predict might then look better.
3. If you want to save space you should make sure to not have more volume pools than you need to. Having many pools mean you split your available TBs you have to write into potentially many subsections. This in turn leads to many half used media.

Tell us more about the requirement if this wasn't helpful.

[V4]

should you have done extending retention to 1 year (for existing backups which have not expired yet and change retention to 1 year in policy which would effect to newer jobs scheduled)

riaan was right .. you should create another schedule with extended retention and ensure monthly and yearly set do not collide together... unless you explicitely need it... else put exclusion for those days.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

About mixing retentions on tape - not a good idea.

If you have a mix of 1 month and 1 year retentions on tape, you will not be able to reuse tapes when 1 month backups expire. All images on tape must expire before media can be reused.

See this blog and comments: Understanding how NetBackup writes to a tape. 

**** EDIT ****

This seems to be related to your other unresolved forum post?

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/retention-period-4 

Please try to follow op on all your unresolved forum posts...