Expired Objects with No Limit Retention?

[booman55]

We have a small site that uses No Limit retention policy across the board. I've been noticing on some of the backup runtime statistics that they're getting sometimes a large number of objects being expired.

How is this possible with No Limit retention? Is this due to reclamation or some other process?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Tiger22]

Check the copygroup settings. Is is definitely set to No Limit for both VEREXISTS and RETEXTRA? Could be that one of the two is not set properly.

 

[booman55]

No Limit No Limit No Limit No Limit

 

[moon-buddy]

Has the policy been activated properly?

 

[booman55]

Yes, policy activated.

 

[BBB]

You are misunderstanding what it is saying, it is a bit confusing though I'll grant.

When the client says it is "expiring" a file, technically what it really should be saying is the file has been deleted from the client and it is "inactivating" the file rather than "expiring" it. You will find the files will NOT be expired from the TSM server, they have just been inactivated, which means they are canditates for expiration, and the mgmtclass retention settings will then be applied to them every time expiration is run. If everything is NOLIMIT they will remain inactive (and not expire) forever.

 

[booman55]

BBB, What do you mean by inactivating? Are you saying a new version was backed up and these files became inactive versions?

If that was the case the number of expired files would never be greater than the number of backed up files, which isn't true in my case.

Thanks.

 

[BBB]

No what I am saying is when the baclient says it is "expiring" a file, I think what its really trying to tell you is the file has been deleted on the client so its inactivating the active copy on the server. The inactivated copy (plus other inactive copies of the same file) are then eligible for expiration once they meet your retention settings.

If a file has merely changed then you won't see a message about expiring or inactivating it (although part of the process will be to inactivate the current active version but that's different.)

 

[booman55]

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification.