Retentions for Oracle Database Backups

[JohnnyBMP]

Hello,
I'm wondering what your oracle backup retention is.

We are a large university with ~50,000 students and ~10,000 employees. Our retention is currently 30 days for dev/test oracle backups backed up weekly and for production 180 days backed up daily. These are all full backups using RMAN to back up to TSM on Solaris servers. Backup go to LTO4 tape via diskpools. Our TSM occupancy for these is >400TBs. The dev/test backups we feel are ok, these only cover about 30TBs. The heavy load is obviously production.

What I've proposed is 30 days with weeklies going out to 180days or six months which should drop the space or number of backups down to a third or so for production. Unfortunately my management has taken it upon itself to ask the DBAs and end user groups what they think the retention should be and of course they want way more and every one wants a different retention.

So I'd like to know what your data center's retention is for oracle, or database backups in general, so I can offer real world examples. I appreciate any input you may have.
Thanks,
JB

 

[Jeroen]

A retention of 4 days. Most customers would be out of business if they would have to roll back more then 2 days.

And even then we rarely restore fully. Normally only restore fully to an alternative system and from there export/import a part of the DB (eg tablespace) into the damaged DB,