* Brandon Zermeno <Brandon.Zermeno AT pulte DOT com> [2007-07-19 15:50]:
> We had an issue where was server was down for over 2 weeks and the last
> full backups expired. The retention for this environment is 2 weeks.
> After the tapes expired the App team decided they wanted to restore. Now
> management wants Veritas to extend the retention period automatically if
> a full is not successfully run. I do not know of any company that has
> this capability so I am looking for ideas. I do not think it would be
> possible for a person to manually track all the servers and their last
> full and then manually bpexpdate the images. I have pushed back with the
> question of why was this server allowed to be down for 2 weeks but
> nobody is answering.

If the policy was a two week retention, and the app guys knew that, it
sounds like they are out of luck.  Would the response have been any
different if they were trying to get an old file?  At a minimum, a
review of your retentions for that system (and probably the rest of
them, too) is in order.

You _could_ do it with some scripting, but you are asking for headaches.
There are a lot of questions you need to answer in order to pull this
off, like; are you comparing against a flat timespan, or will it change
per policy/client/whatever?  how soon do you want to extend the
retentions, immediately following a failure, 1 day, 1 week, etc? How far
do you extend it?  What about notifications?  Is blindly doing this
going to deplete your tapes, causing more issues than it fixes?

There is no substitute for a person actually looking at what's going on
in the environment.  It sounds like what you really need is to look into
better ways of reporting on what's happening, and not just the backup
admins.  The managers and admins of the systems being backed up should
be watching, too.  That can be homegrown or third-party.  The data is
there, it just depends on how much effort you want to (or can) put into it.  

-- 
David Rock
david AT graniteweb DOT com
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