Extended retention - What happens if monthly backup fails?

I think its important to note the feature you are referring to is called Advanced Retention not Extended Retention.

Avamar Extended Retention is a much different concept and involves considerably more than assigning a retention and tag value.

To address your question, Advanced Retention enables you to effectively assign 4 different retention values to a single backup eliminating the need to perform or configure

more than one backup to accommodate a monthly backup for example requiring a different retention value. However, the assigned days when these take place are fixed for

the four values as follows:

Yearly – January 1st

Monthly – 1st of each month

Weekly – Sundays

Daily’s – everyday

In all cases if the backup did not take place on the above days the next successful backup will assign the appropriate tag value to it. For example, if Sundays backup was skipped

then Mondays backup will be assigned the weekly tag value.

However, your question raises an interesting point to which I don’t have the answer ☹ sorry. I’m not sure the appropriate defined retention values will actually follow the tag if

it ends up being assigned to a different day. I think it would be simple to test though, configure a test backup and skip either the 1st of the month or on a Sunday then run it afterwards

to confirm the tag is assigned but see if that backup has the defined retention assigned to it as well.

regards,

Adam

Thanks for your response and your explanation regarding the differences between extended and advanced retention.

We are going to try what you mention regarding skipping backups. In fact, our full backups run only once a week, let's say Monday for example, so I can check if last Monday (May 4th) backups where tagged as Monthly and if retention is as expected. I'll let you know the results.

Besides that, we are worried not just about skipped backups but failed ones. Is a failed backup (let's say it run out of window or something happened with the server) marked as monthly even when it's not usefull at all?

If this is the case, I'll have to find out how to schedule a monitor with DPA to be aware of monthly backups failure and to find out how to remedy this to have the monthly backup with the correspondent retention.

Regards,

Noelia

nvalle wrote: Besides that, we are worried not just about skipped backups but failed ones. Is a failed backup (let's say it run out of window or something happened with the server) marked as monthly even when it's not usefull at all?

Only successful backup will be assigned retention tags. Lets say if backup was failed on 1st, 2nd and 3rd of March, a successful backup on 4th march will have tags as DWM - Daily, Weekly, Monthly (Considering 1st March was a Sunday) or DM - Daily, Monthly (Considering 1st March was not a Sunday). This tag can be DWMY - Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly as well if no backup has been done before for the client in current year.

Regards,

Pawan

One resolution for this would be to change the retention tags for a backup the day before to Monthly...depending upon what data you are backing up this would be better than nothing.