PowerProtect Data Manager 19.14 File System User Guide

For protection policies created in PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 or earlier, the Extend Retention objective allows you to extend the retention period for the primary backup copy for long-term retention. For example, your regular schedule for daily backups uses a retention period of 30 days. However, you can extend the retention period to keep full backups taken on Mondays for 10 weeks.

Both centralized and self-service protection policies support weekly, monthly, and yearly recurrence schedules to meet the demands of your compliance objectives. For example, you can retain the last full backup containing the last transaction of a fiscal year for 10 years. Extended retention periods can retain scheduled full backups with a repeating pattern for a specified amount of time.

For example:

• Retain full yearly backups that are set to repeat on the first day of January for 5 years.
• Retain full monthly backups that are set to repeat on the last day of every month for 1 year.
• Retain full yearly backups that are set to repeat on the third Monday of December for 7 years.

Preferred alternatives

When you define an extended retention objective for a protection policy, you define matching criteria that select preferred backups to retain. If the matching criteria do not identify a matching backup, PowerProtect Data Manager automatically retains the preferred alternative backup according to one of the following methods:

• Look-back—Retain the last available full backup that was taken before the matching criteria.
• Look-forward—Retain the next available full backup that was taken after the matching criteria.

For example, consider a situation where you configured a protection policy to retain the daily backup for the last day of the month to extended retention. However, a network issue caused that backup to fail. In this case, look-back matching retains the backup that was taken the previous day, while look-forward matching retains the backup that was taken the following day.

By default, PowerProtect Data Manager uses look-back matching to select the preferred alternative backup. A grace period defines how far PowerProtect Data Manager can look in the configured direction for an alternative backup. If PowerProtect Data Manager cannot find an alternative backup within the grace period, extended retention fails.

You can use the REST API to change the matching method or the grace period for look-forward matching. The PowerProtect Data Manager Public REST API documentation provides instructions. If there are no available backups for the defined matching period, you can change the matching method to a different backup.

For look-forward matching, the next available backup can be a manual backup or the next scheduled backup.

Selecting backups by weekday

This section applies to centralized protection policies. Self-service protection policies have no primary backup objective configuration.

When you configure extended retention to match backups by weekday, PowerProtect Data Manager might identify a backup as having been taken on the wrong weekday. This behavior happens where the backup window does not align with the start of the day. PowerProtect Data Manager identifies backups according to the day on which the corresponding backup window started, rather than the start of the backup itself.

For example, consider a backup schedule with an 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. backup window:

• Backups that start at 12:00 a.m. on Sunday and end at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday are identified as Saturday backups, since the backup window started on Saturday.
• Backups that start at 8:01 p.m. on Sunday and end at 12:00 a.m. on Monday are identified as Sunday backups, since the backup window started on Sunday.
• Backups that start at 12:00 a.m. on Monday and end at 6:00 a.m. on Monday are identified as Sunday backups, since the backup window started on Sunday.

In this example, when you select Sunday backups for extended retention, PowerProtect Data Manager does not retain backups that were taken between 12:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. This behavior happens even though the backups occurred on Sunday. Instead, PowerProtect Data Manager selects the first available backup that started after 8:00 p.m. on Sunday for extended retention.

If no backups were created between 8:01 p.m. on Sunday and 6:00 a.m. on Monday, PowerProtect Data Manager retains the next alternative to extended retention. In this example, the alternative was taken after 6:00 a.m. on Monday.

Extended retention backup behavior

When PowerProtect Data Manager identifies a matching backup, automatically extended retention creates a job at the beginning of the backup window for the primary objective. This job remains queued until the end of the backup window.

The following examples describe the behavior of backups with extended retention for centralized and self-service protection.

Centralized protection

An hourly primary backup schedule starts on Sunday at 8:00 p.m., and ends on Monday at 6:00 p.m. with a weekly extended retention objective set to repeat every Sunday. PowerProtect Data Manager selects the first available backup starting after 8:00 p.m. on Sunday for long-term retention.

The following diagram illustrates the behavior of backups with extended retention for a configured protection policy. In this example, full daily backups starting at 10:00 p.m. and ending at 6:00 a.m. are kept for 1 week. Full weekly backups are set to repeat every Sunday and are kept for 1 month.

Self-service protection

For self-service backups, PowerProtect Data Manager uses a default backup window of 24 hours. A backup schedule starts on Sunday at 12:00 p.m, and ends on Monday at 12:00 p.m. with a weekly extended retention objective set to repeat every Sunday. PowerProtect Data Manager selects the first available backup that is taken between 12:00 p.m. on Sunday and 12:00 p.m. on Monday for long-term retention.

Replication of extended retention backups

You can change the retention time of selected full primary backups in a replication objective by adding a replication objective to the extended retention backup. The rules in the extended retention objective define the selected full primary backups. Review the following information about replication of extended retention backups.

• Before you configure replication of extended retention backups, create a replication objective for the primary backup.
• Configure the replication objective of the extended retention and match this objective with one of the existing replication objectives based on the primary backup. Any changes to a new or existing storage unit in the extended retention replication objective or the replication objective of the primary backup is applied to both replication objectives.
• The replication objective of extended retention backups only updates the retention time of replicated backup copies. New backup copies are not created in the replication storage.