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Data Retention: Purging Full Backup With Incrementals, Retention 1 Day 0 Cycle

  • 13 September 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 36 views

Hello,

I have a Storage Policy with the disks and retentions shown below. The idea behind this design is shorten the time required to backup to the primary, then Aux copy(slower disks) can be done later. For jobs with a Full(day1), Incremental (next 20 days), I have seen the full and incrementals being retained on the primary and not aging after 1 day. I understand why as the Full and incrementals are needed to restore, but is there any way to age them off the primary as they will be available on Aux Copys. I have been manually deleting the jobs off the Primary as space starts to run out, but the next incremental job automatically converts itself to a Full backup. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

  1. Primary - SSDs 3TBs - Retention 1 Day 0 Cycle
  2. Aux Copy - HDDs 40TBs - Retention 21 Day 1 Cycle
  3. Aux Copy - Tape Storage

Have a look into Spool Copies (commvault.com) which are ‘used as a temporary holding area for data until it is copied to an active synchronous copy’. 

As @Erase4ndReuseMedia said, look into a spool copy instead of days/cycles, however, if you use deduplication then you can’t use spool retention.

Even if you have retention as 1 day, 0 cycles you’ll end up retaining all the backups as part of the “cycle”. Documentation has a good run-down on how retention in days & cycles works: https://documentation.commvault.com/2023e/expert/manage_backup_retention_and_recover_storage_space_data_aging.html 

@hiLance 

A spool copy is used as a temporary holding area for data until it is copied to an active synchronous copy.

Spool copy has a retention rule of 0 days and 0 cycles. Hence, when an Auxiliary Copy job is run:

  • All the data (backup jobs) on the spool copy is copied to the secondary copy.

  • The data on the spool copy is pruned immediately and the space on the spool copy is available for new backup jobs.

  • For snapshots, if you perform a backup copy operation or copy the data to a replication or vault copy, then data will be aged automatically. If you do not copy the data to these copies, then you need to manually age the data.

Spool copies are recommended on disk libraries that have limited resources and capacity available on the disk.

As others have said, it looks like the perfect example of use for a Spool Copy.

 

Even with Cycles retention set to 0, that means only the current cycle will be retained in Storage, as soon as another full backup is done, all previous full+incrementals will be ready to age.

 

But for your case it definitely sounds like Spool Copy is the way

Thank you all for your responses.

After reading about Spool Copies it looks like that is what I was looking for. I have implemented and there is one downside I am seeing is that it is a much heavier load on the network as there is no deduplication and all data must now be transferred over the network for this copy. I will run with this for a week and see how this performs. It might cause some issues with the larger VMs (1TB+) and length of backup time on the full backups.

For context, the majority of the backups are Vmware VM backups using hotadd transport on a 10Gbps network. 

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