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What is the proper way to retain data for a laptop that will be re-issued?

  • 3 November 2021
  • 4 replies
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J
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My company has been doing things entirely wrong with Commvault, and it has led to a situation where data was not recoverable. 

When an employee leaves and returns a laptop, that laptop will be re-imaged and re-issued to a different/new employee. The previous admin would change the host name for the client, adding --old, so that it no longer matched, disabled Data Aging for the client, then released the license and make the computer inactive. They would then push the software back out to the re-imaged laptop as a new client. This worked in older versions of CV, apparently, but it was violating license usage, and now it doesn’t work at all. 

Are legal holds the only way to maintain the data from a client that will be re-imaged and re-issued, or is there a process for this I can’t find in the CV documentation?

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Best answer by Chris Hollis 3 November 2021, 02:11

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Chris Hollis
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Hi @Joseph Scianna 

Hope you’re well!

Just out of curiosity, what license usage was being violated? Commvault or other? 

The process they were taking originally in theory should work… i’d expect the ‘old’ laptops data would remain on storage until retention was met.

You would however need to cross check a few settings within the control panel under the ‘data aging’ tab which may dictate otherwise, please refer to: https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/11019_media_management_configuration_data_aging.html

E.G. “Days to keep jobs of de-configured clients” & “Delete deconfigured clients that have no protected data”
 

Additionally, as far as best practices / our recommendations on how to manage laptops go, I’d recommend utilizing the workflow found within the following article: https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/133807_retiring_offline_laptop_clients.html
 

So basically, you would deconfigure the laptop (releasing it’s license), re-image the laptop with a different name, re-install the software (new client name = new client in commvault) & based off the parameters defined in the workflow settings, the ‘old’ laptop will be updated accordingly.


If you don’t want to use the workflow, the official retirment steps I’d recommend for a laptop can be seen here: https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/essential/135671_retiring_offline_laptops_associated_with_plan.html


I’m also interested in finding out why the old laptop data is unrecoverable, were the laptop clients being deleted by admins as part of the process?

Happy to help you validate this, unless you already have with support?


Let me know if you have any questions.

Chris ​​​​​​​

J
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Hi Chris, 

First, thank you for the detailed response. This is a lot of good information and I appreciate you taking the time to provide it. 

To answer some of your questions - 

A CV engineer working on another problem saw we had a group called Inactive Clients with computers that had their licenses released. He asked what we were doing with them and I explained the process. He told me that technically we were violating our license count because we were keeping data for clients that were not being counted against our total available licenses, and this was a “bug” in the version we were on and would be remedied in future releases (i.e. releasing the license would make the client unavailable for future restores). I explained that we had to reconfigure the clients, essentially putting them back into active license usage, before we could run a restore anyway, and he said that would no longer be functional in a near-term release.

The data was no longer accessible because the storage policies for clients were changed, the clients were moved to a different media agent during the pandemic when the office went remote, and the existing storage polices were not migrated to the new media agent. That essentially made them useless. 

I wanted to make sure that I am “holding” the data in a way that doesn’t cause a license compliance issue and ensures the data is there no matter how long we keep the clients as “inactive”. It looks like, with some minimal changes, the existing process can be adapted. 

Thank you again for all the great info. 

Joe

Aplynx
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I’m not following this part, ‘He told me that technically we were violating our license count because we were keeping data for clients that were not being counted against our total available licenses, and this was a “bug” in the version we were on and would be remedied in future releases (i.e. releasing the license would make the client unavailable for future restores).’

You can install a restore only client if the machine was still available and you can restore out of place. to the local drive of another machine with the corresponding agent installed or even use that machine as a proxy to restore to a UNC path. Neither option requires a license. 

Liam
Chris Hollis
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Thanks @Joseph Scianna 

If you don’t mind, could I please get the support incident number where this was advised? 

I’d like to review/get additional context if possible.

 

Regards,
Chris​​​​​​​

 

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