Precautions For Assigning Retention Periods

• Be certain to assign a retention period that is long enough because NetBackup stops tracking backups when the retention period expires, making it difficult or impossible to recover files.
• Within a policy, always assign a longer retention period to full backups than to incrementals. Otherwise, it may not be possible to restore all your files.
• Archive schedules normally use a retention period of infinite.
• For WORM (write once, read many) optical platters (supported only on UNIX servers), set the retention to infinite. If infinite is unacceptable because of NetBackup database space limitations, set the retention period to match the length of time that you want to retain the data. For retention periods that are less than infinite, you must delete the WORM platter from the Media Manager configuration upon expiration, or Media Manager will reallocate the platter for future backups (even though WORM can be written only once).