Different retentions on different days

Question

Hi all,

In Avamar, is there a way to specify retentions such that for an arbitrary group of clients:

Last Friday of every month: 4 months retention
All other Fridays: 2 months retention
All other remaining days: 1 month retention

I understand that the "Advanced Retention Policy" is not suited for this use case because the Tag dates are hardcoded.

But is there a way I could do this using the "Basic Retention Policy"?

I was testing this by making 3 groups, each using a different Basic Retention Policy, but the problem is, on the last Friday of the month, the backup ran twice - one for "Last Friday" retention and another for the "Other Fridays" retention - which is not I wanted.
I only wanted it to run once using the "Last Friday" retention, because it was the last Friday of the month.

Thanks in advance,

RLeon

Zhou · Accepted Answer

I understood your request, but unfortunately there is no solution. There is no schedule like all Friday except the last one. Maybe you can raise a RFE for this.

rleon_bw · Answer

Sorry for bumping. Does anyone know how to achieve this? Please let me know if I need to explain the problem better.

rleon_bw · Answer

Thanks for confirming.

It seems that the closest thing would be to use an "Advanced Retention Policy".

However, as the administrator guide states, specific dates and time are hardcoded as below:

each day begins at 00:00:01 GMT,
each week begins on Sunday
each month begins on the first calendar day of that month
and each year begins on January 1.

The only thing it could do for us then is to assign different retentions on the backups created on the above hardcoded dates based on their Tags, but there is no way to change those dates.

Thanks again.

Zhou · Answer

I know some customers are using a customized script to change the backup retention periodically. So that you can run a daily backup and let script to change the retention for particular backups with your own policy. But it needs some programming skill.

rleon_bw · Answer

I hope this gets included in the GUI in the next version.

Avamar

Different retentions on different days

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