Backup Central

Hi Everyone!

My companay is in the middle of rolling out CommVault v9.0. I have a question regarding how to seprate the monthly full data from everything else on tapes.

Currently we write everything to tape because we do not have enough disk.

Our storage policy is set up to have a basic retention of 21 days and our extended retention is 365 days for our monthly full.


Current process

When new servers are added a full backup is run. CommVault marks this as extended retention and keeps the data for 365 days. When the next full is written the past backup becomes basic retention.

Data is written to a single tape that has both basic and extended retention. So, if there is one job on the tape that has extended retention, the whole tape is marked as exteneded retention.

What I would like to happen

When a monthly full is written (last weekend of the month) that data is marked as extended retention and is kept for 365 days. All other fulls should have basic retention.

Also, I would like only 1 kind of retention per tape so monthly data doesn't get written with daily data.


Is this possible? What have others done to get around these issues?

Hi There!

I can tell you that we posed the same question to CommVault support and they pointed us in the direction of setting up and scheduling a selective AuxCopy to run once a month under our storage policy. By setting up the selective copy and removing the extended retention rules from our primary copy the process will copy your last or first full backup of the month to another set of tapes with whatever retention you specify. While this method does work I don't consider it to be very efficient. It requires a seperate copy process with additional tapes every month.

I found what I consider a better solution for our environmet when digging around in the schedule policies for our jobs.

First I opened up the properties sheet of one of our schedule policies and edited the "WeeklyFull" backup task. I scheduled the task to run every weekend "except" the last weekend of the month. You can set this option by clicking on the "options" button and then "advanced" on the window that pops up.

I then created an addition full backup task called "MonthEnd" and scheduled it to only run on the last weekend of each month. I then clicked on the "advanced" options for the task and under the "Media" tab checked "Start new media" and "Mark media full on success". Then on the bottom of the same window under "extend job retention" I changed the selction from "Storage Policy Default" to "Number of Days" and set it to 365.

Setting up the schedule this way will make sure that your monthly job is put on seperate media from your weekly full's and still extend the retention for your "monthly" fulls for 365 days.

The last step was to go back to my original storage policy and uncheck the extended retention rules under the primary copy so that my weekly full backups only had a basic retention for 28 days. This would be 21 days for you. NOTE: Unchecking the extended retention rules will remove any existing extended retention jobs contained in your primary copy during the next data aging. If you wish to keep this data until the extended retnetion is met on any previous jobs you can set up a new primary copy with basic retention only. The original copy will be changed to a synchronous copy and you can delete it once all of the extended retention has expired.