cdot snapvault setup and 7 year retention

nsansari — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 21:19:27 GMT

I have been reading a lot of posts and ONTAP documentation but still confused as to how this should be setup.

Requirement is to have snapshots as below.

Source: every 4hr for 2 days
daily for 7 days
weekly for 4 weeks

Destination: daily 30 days
  weekly 8
  monthly 12
  yearly 7

I have followed the Snapvault express guide to set this up on a test volume but still not clear and can't get it to work as expected. The step are

1. create a new vol on destination
2. create a new schedule on destination ( use default daily to run overnight)
3. create snapshot policy on source and apply to source vol
4. create a snapvault policy on destination.
5. create the snapvault relationship on destination

What is confusing me is step 3 and 4.

I have created the snapshot policy in step 3 on the cluster level, does this have to be on the svm level ??, do I add the local schedules and the destination schedules to this same policy ??
As we don't want to keep monthly or yearly on the primary I set the retention to 0 ( or should this be 1 ??)

Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

===========================================

CIFS                             5 true    -
    Schedule               Count     Prefix                 SnapMirror Label
    ---------------------- -----     ---------------------- -------------------
    CIFS_STD                  12     CIFS_STD               -
    weekly                     4     weekly                 -
    CIFS_YEARLY                0     CIFS_YEARLY            cifs-snapvault-yearly
    CIFS_MNTH                  0     CIFS_MNTH              cifs-snapvault-monthly
    daily                      0     daily                  cifs-snapvault-daily

==========================================

   SnapMirror Policy Name: cifs-snapvault
      SnapMirror Policy Type: vault
                Policy Owner: vserver-admin
                 Tries Limit: 8
           Transfer Priority: normal
   Ignore accesstime Enabled: false
     Transfer Restartability: always
Network Compression Enabled: false
             Create Snapshot: false
                     Comment: -
       Total Number of Rules: 3
                  Total Keep: 49
                       Rules: SnapMirror Label               Keep Preserve Warn
                              ------------------------------ ---- -------- ----
                              cifs-snapvault-daily             30 false       0
                              cifs-snapvault-monthly           12 false       0
                              cifs-snapvault-yearly             7 false       0

==========================================

Re: cdot snapvault setup and 7 year retention

chris_hague — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 15:37:57 GMT

As we don't want to keep monthly or yearly on the primary I set the retention to 0 ( or should this be 1 ??)

I'm afraid you have to keep 1 on the primary.

You probably wont be able to allow space to keep 1 yearly, suggest using monthly instead.

This was supposed to be resolved in a later version of ontap.

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cdot snapvault setup and 7 year retention

Re: cdot snapvault setup and 7 year retention