I am quoting the excerpts from Networker 8.0 Administrator Guide for your understanding and in context to the discussion here
"
A retention policy can also be specified for a media pool. If the retention policy is
specified for a media pool as well as the client, the NetWorker software will be the longer
of the two policies.
Assigning a retention policy to a clone pool has special implications. When a retention
policy is specified in a clone pool, all save sets that are directed to the clone pool take on
the retention policy of the clone pool regardless of the retention policy of the save set
client. “Specifying browse and retention policies for clone data” on page 337 provides
more information.
When browse and retention policies are specified with a command line program, such as
save -w -y, the browse and retention policies are taken from that program. “Browse and
retention policies for manual backups” on page 274 provides more information."
I also see on Page 252 in the same guide that "The length of time that data is available for recovery by the NetWorker server is determined by the browse and retention policies associated with each client." I deduct from this that retention policies set at client level will supersede the retention policies set at group level.
I will also add in this context for more information:- Assigning multiple policies to a single client
" Identical versions of a client and save set combination can have a different set of browse
and retention policies assigned for each different backup group to which it belongs. If you
create an identical Client resource with the same name and save set values, but assign it
to a different backup group, you can designate a different set of browse and retention
policies. The NetWorker server employs the Browse Policy and Retention Policy attributes
that correspond to the unique combination of the Client resource’s Name, Save Set, and
Group attributes.
Example 18 Assigning different policies for an identical client
You have a Client resource for the host saturn. The Client resource has a save set value of
All and is assigned to backup group general. The browse policy is weekly and the retention
policy is monthly. You create a copy of the Client resource for saturn, but assign it to the
backup group special. This version of saturn has a browse policy of Weekly and a retention
policy of yearly.
◆ If the group special is backed up, then the weekly and yearly policies are applied.
◆ If the group general is backed up, then the policies weekly and monthly are used."
Based on that I think in your case it will be retention policy at client level that will apply.
Best practice is to have retention set on one place. From my experience, retention set on pool will override one set in client, but then again I never used setup where pool would have lower retention than set on client. If you already had such backup, you can run mminfo command to see which retention was applied, for example:
crazyrov
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Posted January 15th, 2014 03:00
Hi Isandra,
The greatest retention will be forced on the saveset.