Protection Manager - Restores

[sscott]

This is our first Protection Manager deployment.  Screenshots are attached.

1.       Take a look at our policy.  The restore wizard isn't displaying all the restore points that we’re expecting.

2.       The restore points are not labeled (daily, weekly, etc).  What is the logic for that?

[adaikkap]

Hi Scott,

1.        Take a look at our policy.  The restore wizard isn't displaying all the restore points that we’re expecting.

Can you get the output of following commands to explain why you dont see, what you expect?

dfpm policy node get <you dataset policy name>

dfpm backup list <dsname>

2.       The restore points are not labeled (daily, weekly, etc).  

They are labelled only in cli and not in UI.

dfpm backup list <dsname> will have the retention types.

What is the logic for that?

Space crunch in the UI i guess.

Regards

adai

[smoot]

Hi Scott --

I'll echo Adai's question: what restore points did you expect and which ones are missing?

Regarding labelling the backup type, our thinking was that wasn't really relevent.  The retention class only tells the code when to delete the backups, but other than that, there's no real difference between a daily and weekly backup.

At least, that was our thinking.  How would knowing the retention type help you pick which backup to restore?

-- Pete

[sscott]

Based on the policy (GUI screenshot in original post), I was expecting to see the following restore options:

Primay Data

2 x daily

Backup

6 x daily

12 x weekly

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>dfpm backup list 386

Backup Id Backup Version        Retention Type Node Name            Description

--------- --------------------- -------------- -------------------- -----------------------

---

      250 23 Mar 2010 00:05:04  daily          Backup

      248 22 Mar 2010 20:00:04  daily          Primary data

      246 22 Mar 2010 00:05:05  daily          Backup

      244 21 Mar 2010 23:00:06  weekly         Primary data

      242 21 Mar 2010 00:05:06  daily          Backup

      240 20 Mar 2010 20:00:05  daily          Primary data

      239 20 Mar 2010 00:05:06  daily          Backup

      132 13 Jan 2010 07:34:58  unlimited      Backup

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>dfpm policy node get 354

Node Id:                    1

Node Name:                  Primary data

Hourly Retention Count:     2

Hourly Retention Duration:  0

Daily Retention Count:      2

Daily Retention Duration:   172800

Weekly Retention Count:     1

Weekly Retention Duration:  0

Monthly Retention Count:    0

Monthly Retention Duration: 0

Backup Script Path:

Backup Script Run As:

Failover Script Path:

Failover Script Run As:

Snapshot Schedule Id:       357

Snapshot Schedule Name:     SnapVault Test Weekly Schedule

Warning Lag Enabled:        Yes

Warning Lag Threshold:      129600

Error Lag Enabled:          Yes

Error Lag Threshold:        129600

Node Id:                    2

Node Name:                  Backup

Hourly Retention Count:     0

Hourly Retention Duration:  0

Daily Retention Count:      2

Daily Retention Duration:   518400

Weekly Retention Count:     2

Weekly Retention Duration:  7257600

Monthly Retention Count:    1

Monthly Retention Duration: 0

[smoot · Accepted solution]

So far, I'm not seeing a huge problem (well, one small problem but that's fixable).  What specifically are you concerned about?  Let me explain what I see.

On the primary node, you've got two daily and one weekly backup.  The question is "why a weekly?"  I don't know how this got created, but if you look at the primary node details, you'll see the "Weekly retention count" is 1.  We actually retain backups based on both a count and duration (this saves you when backups stop working for a long time -- we don't want to delete your last known good backup or two).  You can set the retention count to zero if you like, but you have to use the "dfpm policy node set" command, you can't do this from the GUI. Once you do, the weekly backup will be deleted.  Or, just delete the actual snapshots and we'll forget the backup ever existed.

On the secondary node, I see four daily and an "unlimited" backup.  Ignore the unlimited backup, that represents the snapshots used to keep the SnapVault relationship alive.  It'll be replaced with a new version the next time a SV update runs.

The four daily backups look fine.  If this policy hasn't been in place for more than four days, that's to be expected.  You have your retention set to six days, so I'm assuming none of these is over six days old.

You don't have any weekly backups.  Do you have them scheduled?  You won't get any unless you have a weekly or monthly schedule on the primary->backup connection, and that schedule must have weekly events configured.

-- Pete

[sscott]

Thanks for all your help, Pete.

The issue was a policy misconfiguration.

The primary and backup retention schedules were correct, but the transfer schedule had been incorrect for some time.

Everything is working now...such a great technology now that we've got all the policies and relationships established!