Preserve Single Job Set setting tells Backup & Disaster Recovery appliance not to recycle a job until a viable replacement exists. It is recommended to use to ensure that the most recent full backup and any subsequent differential or incremental backups stay on appliance and are not deleted automatically.
To enable this setting:
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Log in to the appliance Management Console, and go to Settings › Automatic Jobs Management.
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In the Job Retention Policy drop-down list box, select Preserve Single Job Set.
This option will affect the retention settings until a new full backup is available.
For example, If you have a client with the following settings:
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Backup schedule: Monthly (full backups – on the first Sunday, differential backups – on the second/fifth Sunday, and incremental backups – every Monday–Saturday)
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Retention:
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full backups – five weeks
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differential backups – one week
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incremental backups – five days
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Preserve Single Job Set is enabled
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This is what you will see:
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Full and incremental backup will run for the first week.
Expired incremental backups will not be deleted because of the Preserve Single Job Set setting.
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Differential and incremental backup will run for the first week.
Expired incremental backups from the first week will be deleted because the differential backup has the required data collected from the time when the full backup ran.
Expired incremental backups for the second week will not be deleted because of the Preserve Single Job Set setting.
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Incremental backup will run for the third and fourth week.
Both the expired differential and the expired incremental backups from the second, third and fourth week will not be deleted because of the Preserve Single Job Set setting.
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Full backup will run on the first Sunday of the following month.
At this point, all expired differential and incremental backups from the previous month will be deleted (once they reach their retention limit).
The more time between the full backups on a client, the greater the impact of the Preserve Single Job Set option.
If you are running out of space because differential and incremental backups are not automatically deleted upon reaching their retention limit, check if you have enabled Preserve Single Job Set. If enabled, then appliance operates as designed, and you should modify the backup schedules and retention settings. Set the backup schedule to Weekly instead of Monthly, and change the retention settings accordingly (retain backups for one week at a minimum, preferably for 2 weeks if the backup schedule is Weekly; retain setting for one month at a minimum if the backup schedule is Monthly).
If you need a one-month set of backups available for restore, but do not have enough RAID space, you have two options:
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Expand the RAID space (contact Support for details).
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Use the archiving feature to save a copy of the backup job on a removable storage device.
Appliance does not account removable storage devices for retention purposes. If you move a backup job to the storage device, and delete it from the RAID, the new backup jobs will not account the moved job. Archive jobs will stay on the storage device until they are deleted manually or the device is formatted.