Avamar: Replication runs on retired clients with zero progress bytes

Replication runs daily with zero progress bytes for the retired clients on the source. New bytes are also 0% for these clients.

There are several possible causes for the replication of the clients reporting zero progress bytes:

• The clients were recently retired on the source, but previously replicated to the target. As these clients reside somewhere other than the /RETIRED domain on the target, the 0-byte replication must be performed to modify the account settings on the target. 
  • In this case, the 0-byte replication only occurs once, and the subsequent replications do not show these clients in the Activity Monitor.
•  The backups are expired on the source but kept due to the "keep_last_backup" setting in mcserver.xml.
  • This setting allows the last backup to be kept for each client, even after the expiration date is passed.
  • If "keep_last_backup" is set on the source and the expired backups do not exist on the target, the replication tries to replicate these backups to the target, but they are not replicated as they have already been expired.
    • In this case, the 0-byte replication occurs daily until the expired backups on the source are removed.
• The expiration dates have been extended when the clients were retired on the source, for example, from 60 days to 1 year.
  • The "retire client" operation allows the expiration date to be changed when the clients are retired, but these changes are not propagated to the backups on the target.
  • Once the replication completes after the clients are retired with the new expiration dates, these clients are moved to the /RETIRED domain but with the same expiration dates as before.
    • This means that the backups on the target expire sooner than the ones on the source.
    • When this happens, the replication tries to replicate the backups that were removed from the target.
    • However, the backup is still on the target before garbage collection (GC) deletes it permanently, and the replication restores the backup on the target but with the new expiration date to match with the source.
      • As there is nothing to replicate in this case, the 0-byte replication occurs.
        • This could occur daily, as the backups on the target would be removed daily for the daily backups.
        • All the backups on the target are eventually removed, and replaced with the ones with the new expiration dates that match with the ones on the source.
        • Once all backups on the target become the same as the ones on the source, down to the expiration dates, the 0-byte replication does not occur again.

These entries can be ignored as this is the expected behavior.