Tape Expiration dates wrong using multiple pools & retention policies

[BungleBear]

NW Version - 7.1.1
OS - Win2k

We are having problems with our tapes expiriation dates.
We have 3 different retention/browse policies - 6 month, 1 year, 10 years.
we have a group for each of the retentions and a separate pool for each.
Each client has been recreated for each different retention.

For some reason i havent been able to track down since i created the 10 year all the 6 month tapes have been having a expiriation of 10 years ?

Any help on this would be gratefully recieved.

 

[hdvries]

I have seen the same problem at several sites. NetWorker will save all indexes with the longest retention period configured for the server itself. So if you have backups defined on the server with a retention period of ten years, all the indexes will get the same ten years as retention time.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to create a dummy client for the server system, which get the same or shorter retention period the you define in the other clients in the same savegroup.

 

[605]

The problem is due to so-called 'overlapping save sets'. Even if you have defined different policies for the client setup, NetWorker in this case will use the 'most conservative policy', means the longest policy.

You may set different policies today, but not from the GUI.
For this purpose, use the savegrp command at backup time and set browse and retention dates from the command line at the time you start the backup.

And of course you may change browse and retention policies later as part of a management decision.

In both cases, use the parameters "-w browse_date" and/or "-e retention_date".

For further details, see the command line parameters.