Effects of Other Operations on Data Aging

Delete Data

Data that has been backed up or archived can be permanently deleted. The deleted data will not be available for browsing and recovery.

When data is marked for deletion, the data remains on the media until it is aged off according to the retention rules set for the data in the storage policy or storage policy copy.

Data from Delete Backup/Archive operations can be aged as follows:

• If the Delete Backup/Archive operation is older than all the backup data of the agent that the Delete Backup/Archive job was run for.

• If there are already three Delete Backup/Archive operations that were run for the agent.

• Archive files are aged upon completion of auxiliary copy operations.

  Refer to Delete Backup and Archive Data.

Multiplexed Data

Data protection operations can be run concurrently to the same media using more than one data stream. This avoids having to back up data at much slower than actual speeds of the tape. Multiplexed data chunk sizes are determined by the type of data that is being multiplexed; file system data and database data.

• If the first backup is a file system type backup, all other backups joining multiplexing will have a chunk size of 4 GB.

• If the first backup is a database type backup, all other backups joining multiplexing will have a chunk size of 16 GB.

  Multiplexed data is aged when all jobs (multiplexed) on a single chunk have met the defined retention rules of their associated storage policy copy.

  To enable data multiplexing in a storage policy copy:

• From the CommCell Browser, right click the storage policy copy whose storage policy you want to enable data multiplexing, then click Properties.

• From the Media tab of the Copy Properties dialog box, select Enable Multiplexing.

• Select the number of subclients whose data will be multiplexed to the same media from the Multiplexing Factor list box.

• Click OK to save your changes.

Refer to Data Multiplexing.

Silo Storage

When an active Silo DDB has been sealed and moved to storage, all the backup jobs that went to that DDB must meet the retention rules (defined in their associated storage policy copy) for the DDB to become aged. Once all of the jobs have met their retention criteria, the entire DDB is considered ageable, and the Silo (tape) backup jobs are then aged. The tape designated for the Silo storage is then refreshed and available for re-use.

Extended retention rules are not supported on Storage Policy Copies configured for Silo Storage.

Disabled Jobs

If data aging is performed on a storage policy copy that has disabled jobs, these jobs are aged differently. If the disabled job is a full backup job, the entire cycle is marked as disabled. In this case, data aging does not count the disabled full backup as a valid cycle. If the disabled job is an incremental or differential backup and the full backup job is not disabled, the cycle is counted as a valid cycle.

Partitioned Deduplication Database

If you have a partially available deduplication database (that is, one of the partitions is offline or inaccessible), then the pruning of backed up data from disk will not be performed until all partitions of the deduplication database are available. So, make sure to recover the offline partitions to reclaim the disk space.