Background: We have added new storage arrays and are trying to clean up all the commvault data of the old ones. I know you can choose a mount point and ‘delete all data” but I would rather not force delete things this way if not necessary. I would like to get a process in place where our subclients clean up data properly (or at least on purpose, as we want it to occur) as it appears we have quite a few subclients with incremental backups that the system will not auto clean up because they (per Data Forecast and Compliance Report) are not being cleaned up due to BASIC_CYCLES. Per my understanding, these are sticking around because the client was shut down before we could get another last “Full” backup (or similar, some of the subclients were descheduled or disabled, both of which are not allowing some cleanup to occur). In some cases we have some of these incremental backups only on primary storage ,some on primary and secondary, and some on both + tapes.
Some of these subclients are part of NDMP/NAS backups where we have several subclients on the same client performing backups today, so I cannot just decommission/delicense the client.
Also: our tape retention is ‘infinite”, and most things write certain Fulls to tape.
My question is: Is there a ‘standard” way of handling turning off (turning down) backups of subclients so there are no lingering incremental backups?
I feel that the most proper way would be to manually take 1 last Full backup, then deschedule, but I do not control who or when servers are decommissioned so I usually find out after it has been shut down so I cannot take a “last Full”.
I have been eyeing this setting in control panel>Media Management Configuration>Data Aging (“Ignore cycle retention on backup activity disabled subclients” via Data Aging on disabled clients or subclients based on days only retention | Community (commvault.com) and have been wondering ifI could set this, then just disable any subclient that I want it to clean up the data, but I see this statement “Now, the danger/risk here is that you can easily find yourself with NO backups….so be sure you have the jobs somewhere for as long as you require.” s oI feel as long as we use the mantra “disable nothing (just deschedule) and only disable something to force that subclient to delete its data as a way to clean up” it would work.. but if someone disables something on a client/subclinet ( which is natural way to think ‘harmlessly shutting off”) it might delete all backups by accident. It seems that having this setting ‘not the default” is hinting that a better, more proper method is available, I just can’t see it.