Forgive me if this is a basic question, but I'm relatively new to Commvault though not to backups, being a long-time TSM-er.
First, some background: We are extremely squeezed for storage capacity due to losing lot of storage some months back which we're stsill waiting on to be replaced and consequently are reliant on a single tape library as sole repository of our backups. Spare tapes are always a precious commodity and keeping this library stocked with spares is a challenge, since it's full of tapes with data on them. And forget aux copy, we've no storage for it (I know, I know, I know, but we are stuck with this sad situation for at least the next six months.). So I've been looking for ways to get more efficient in how we use tapes. I got the idea to run a report on the storage policy and sorted the results by "Retain Data Until" with the idea to hunt down tapes holding data that exceeds retention and delete the contents to return them to the scratch pool. (Note that I do see some aged-out tapes listed for the library, I wanted to see all the tapes for this storage policy and what the "retain data until" date is for them.)
Basic retention is to keep 1 cycle for 60 days. The extended retention is to keep weekly fulls for 180 days, and to keep only monthly fulls for 190 days.
So, in the list of tapes the report collected, I went to check the contents of one of the tapes whose "Retain Data Until" date is June 18. This tape holds nothing but incremental backups. According to our retention rules, all the data on this tape should have aged off, but they haven't. Not only that, but the number of cycles listed for the jobs are all over the map, anywhere from 19 to 106. I checked the backup histories for the subclients listed, and they correctly list only weekly full backups for the correct period of time, same for monthly and incremental.
So what could be keeping these incrementals active? Would it be OK to delete the contents anyway, seeing as we have the full backups?
Here's a twist: on the storage policy, the "Basic Retention rules for Data/Compliance Archive Data" is set to Infinite. However, we don't have an archiver license and don't employ archiving.
Thanks for any clarification.
