Chris,

Certain fields in the Management class copy groups are not applicable to the
Exchange Agent.

You should set the Management Class Copy Group as:

If Client data exists 1
If Client data is delete 0

extra backup versions 0
only backup versions 0

To my knowledge there is no direct way to "keep last 7 versions". The
ifolder option will delete backups more than x days old, but it does not
guarantee how many versions will be retained. There is no direct way to do
this.

In order to accomplish this you would have to write a script which would
first do a excdsmc /query and then parse the output forming a list of
candidates for deletion, at the same time retaining the last x versions.

Our site has an SLO to keep  one month's worth of backups, therefore the
ifolder option works well for us. The ability to keep x amount of versions
would be a nice addition to the Connect Agent, as would a little bit of
smarts in the ifolder option whereby it deletes back to the last full backup
there's little point in keeping those worthless incrementals around
without a full backup as a starting point for a recovery.

Nathan


        -----Original Message-----
        From:   Jordan, Chris (ELS) [SMTP:c.jordan AT ELSEVIER.CO DOT UK]
        Sent:   Tuesday, October 05, 1999 5:20 AM
        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        Subject:        Exchange agent and versions kept

        At the present time we have the Exchange agent set to keep 7
versions. These
        7 versions are set both in the Backup Copy group and on the
"AutoDelete
        IfOlder than 7" on the client. We can, therefore, restore from the
Exchange
        server any of these last 7 versions.

        However, looking at the contents of various tapes, it seems that
ADSM is
        actually keeping the Exchange backups for much longer - like about 2
months.

        Experimenting, we reduced the "Retain deleted versions" and "Retain
only
        version" to 7 (they were set to 60 days), and then expired the
inventory.
        All of the older versions of the backups were then deleted (and we
freed up
        9 tapes in the on-site library!).


        The Exchange Agent sends each backup to ADSM with a unique name -
based on
        the date of the backup. Therefore (our reasoning based on the
experimenting)
        these older backups are counted as "deleted" by the ADSM server, and
were
        being kept for 60 days. Now we have set the deleted days to match
the number
        of versions we have a better level of data vs restore capability.

        Is this reasoning correct??

        Cheers, Chris