How long we need to keep the Indexes ?

Index backups should follow the retention period set on the NetWorker server client definition (if you have multiple definitions it will choose the longest retention time), so I would expect the Indexes to be retained for 1 month. Sending index and bootstrap backups to one pool is fine as long as you do not have many weeks of backups directed here before the tape becomes full (some media mow with compression can hold a lot of data and these backups can be relatively small) - you could have a single point of failure with all your backups on one tape if the tape goes bad or anything happens to it.

I would not expect to see backups being retained indefinitely, unless you have configured this directly - how have you identified the index backups retention time?

Regards,

Bill Mason

Hi,

            Your Index Browse Policy and the Retention Policy are depends upon what you configured while creating the Client , It really good you have sperate tape for storing the Index , there are Advantages and the Disadvantages are there , if your server got crashed you can scan only the tape for dumping the Index whereas on the same scenario if you tape gone Bad your whole index will get crashed . 

Rajesh S

>>>> There's no retention policy for this pool and for the moment, Indexes are kept "ad vitam eternam". All my clients are month/month.

The retention policy is best configured on the clients and not the pools. The retention policy of index comes from the retention policy of the client resource for the backup server

>>>>> What's the good policy and how long we need to keep the Indexes. I think the indexes are needed only to restore a corrupted server.

Good policy is what suits your environment the best. Please note that indexes are needed only for browseable recoveries. Even if you have lost indexes you can recover data using save set recovery. Indexes occupy space on the backup server which is a small fraction of the data size (though it is documented to 5% of every backup size) that gets backed up and lives till the indexes for that backup are retained. You you need to plan the space on backup server accorddingly. By default, they go into \index folder of your installation folder but can be relocated for each client. You ned to consider the above while planning the retention policy.

As a good policy, you should backup indexes on a separate media which you are allready doing. It is recommended to clone this media regularly or take a savegrp -O backup for all the clients regularly may be weekly/fortnightly.