Dell NetWorker 19.9 Administration Guide

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Data retention and expiration policies

The NetWorker Console provides separate expiration polices for retaining different types of data to meet the needs of the environment as described in this table. Only a Console Application Administrator can modify these policies.

Table 1. Data retention policies
Retention policy	Type of data to be retained	Default
Statistical data—Affects all legacy Backup Statistics reports and Policy Statistic reports. The retention policy for statistics data can affect multiple reports.	Backup and cloning statistics.	One year
Recover Statistics — Affects Save Set Data in Recover Statistics reports.	Save set records.	One year
Audit Data— Affects User reports. The retention policy for audit data affects only audit reports.	Reports on all NetWorker tasks (except License Manager tasks) performed by specified users (but only when the NetWorker User Auditing system option is activated).	One year
Completion Data (legacy)— Affects Backup Status reports, except in the save set output. Retention policy for completion data can affect multiple reports.	Savegroup and save set completion data and drive data.	One month
Completion Message (legacy)— Affects Backup Status reports, only in the save set output). The retention policy for completion messages can affect multiple reports.	Messages, such as error messages for failed save sets.	Two weeks

You can view the retention policies for data to which they have access by following the first three steps in Setting expiration policies for data retention. These different policies give administrators the flexibility to retain certain types of information for less time than others, as showed in the following example.

NOTE:Reports not mentioned in the above table have no retention policies.

Retention Flexibility

An administrator might want to set the completion message policy to a shorter period than the completion data policy. The precise error messages about what caused a save set backup to stop might not be relevant over a longer period. But it might be useful to save the completion data for a somewhat longer period to help with load balancing and trends.

The longest period (one or more years) might be a suitable selection for save set data. This data is used to generate the NetWorker Backup Statistics reports. These reports can be used to determine historical trends about backups and to help guide capacity planning.

NOTE:The expiration policies restrict the data that can be retrieved by NetWorker Console. In other words, reports cannot include data that is older than the data retention policy. If, for example, an administrator changed a policy expiration period from 1 year to 1 month and soon afterwards reset it to 1 year, 11 months of data would be lost. Once data is cleared because of the retention policy, you can only retrieve the data by recovering the full database.