Extended Retention Rules

Extended retention allows you to retain specific full backups for an additional period of time. For example, you may want to retain your monthly full backups for 90 days.

An extended retention allows you to keep incrementals following a full backup jobs from a source copy when fulls are committed or synthetic fulls complete with errors.

Extended retention rules allow you to define five additional "extended" retention periods for full backups. For example:

• You may want to retain your hourly full backups for specified number of hours.

• You may want to retain your daily full backups.

• You may want to retain your weekly full backups for 30 days.

• You may want to retain your monthly full backup for 90 days.

• You may want to retain your yearly full backup for 365 days.

A backup job will be selected for extended retention based on its start time. For example:

• For monthly based retention, if a backup job starts at 11:55 pm on August 31st and ends at 1 am on September 1st, then it will be selected as the last full backup for the month of August and will be picked up for extended retention.

• For hourly based retention, the first/last full backup job will be picked up within a specific number of hours. If you want to pick up last backup job that ran in every 2 hours for 90 days of period then the extended retention must be set as for Infinite/ 90 days keep Hourly Full Every 2 Hour(s).

Use the following steps for setting up the extended retention rules:

1. From the CommCell Browser, expand Policies | Storage Policies | <Storage Policy>.

2. Right-click the appropriate snapshot copy and click Properties.

3. Click the Retention tab.

4. Set the basic retention rules by clicking Retain for and entering the number of days and cycles appropriate for your organization.

5. Set the extended retention rules as follows:

   • Click the For check box.

   • Enter the number of Days Total to retain the backup.

   • Click the Keep list, and select the desired backup criteria (for example, Hourly Full and Daily Full and so on).

   • Click the Grace Days list and select the number of hours/days (for example, 2).

     Note

     • If you have selected Hourly Full or Daily Full in the list, then specify the time in the For the Daily Full Rule and Hourly Full rule the Day starts at: box, to start the extended retention rule, such as on 8:00 am.

     • If you have selected Weekly Full in the list, then specify the day of the week in the For Weekly Full Rule the Week starts on: box, to start the extended retention rule, such as on Monday.

     • If you have selected Monthly Full in the list, specify the day of the month in the For Monthly Full Rule the Month starts on: box, to start the extended retention rule. For example, if you select 5, the rule starts on the fifth day of the month.

6. Under For all rules keep the area, by default Last full backup of time period option is selected to select only the last full backup jobs in the specified criteria.

   To select first full backup jobs in the specified criteria, select First full backup of time period option.

7. Repeat Step 5 to configure additional extended retention.

8. Click OK.