Dell NetWorker 19.9 Administration Guide

Browse and Retention for data protection policies

You can specify browse and retention for backup save sets and clone save sets as part of the actions in a data protection policy. Retention settings are available for the traditional backup, snapshot backup, VMware backup, server backup, VBA checkpoint backup, and clone actions. Browse settings are available for traditional backup and clone actions only.

A single Client resource can belong to multiple groups. Therefore, you can assign different retention settings for the same client and save set data by configuring different workflows and actions. Consider the following example scenario:

• A client belongs to both Client Group A and Client Group B.
• Client Group A is assigned to Workflow 1, which performs a backup with a retention setting of 1 month.
• Client Group B is assigned to Workflow 2, which performs a backup with a retention setting of 1 year.

In this case, backups for the client that are performed with Workflow 1 are retained for 1 month, and backups for the client that are performed with Workflow 2 are retained for 1 year.

Retention for Client resources

You can assign a retention policy to a client resource that overrides the retention period that is specified in an Action resource, when you configure the Client Override Behavior attribute value to Client Can Override in the Action resource. Assigning a retention policy to a Client resource provides more information.

Retention for Pool resources

Previous versions of NetWorker allowed you to define a value in the Retention attribute of a Pool resource. When you update a NetWorker 8.2.x or earlier server, the update process retains the value that is defined in the Retention attribute of a Pool resource as a read-only value.

Order of precedence for Retention resource attributes

• Client Can Override—The value in Retention attribute of the Client resource takes precedence over the Retention value that is defined in the Action resource.
• Client Can Not Override—The value defined Retention attribute in the Action resource takes precedence over the value that is defined in Retention attribute of the Client resource and the Retention attribute of the Pool resource. In order to set different values for browse and retention periods this option should be set to true.
• Legacy Backup Rules—Enabled for migrations only. NetWorker uses the values that are defined in the Retention attribute of the Pool resource to determine which the retention policy to assign to backup data from a client. The value that is defined in the Retention attribute of the Pool resource take precedence over the Retention value that is defined in the Action resource and the Retention value that is defined in the Client resource.
  NOTE:You cannot modify the legacy attributes in the migrated Pool resources.

Browse and Retention for manual backups

If you specify browse and retention with a manual backup from the command prompt with save -w -y, the browse and retention setting applies to all the save sets that are in the manual backup. Specify the browse and retention setting by using the time and date formats that are accepted by the nsr_getdate program. The save and nsr_getdate UNIX man page and the NetWorker Command Reference Guide provides detailed information about data formats.

If you do not specify the browse and retention for a manual backup, then browse and retention is applied based on the browse and retention setting of either the Client resource or the media pool for the backup, whichever is longer. If there are multiple Client resources for the host, then the longest retention setting applies.