Glen Vassileff wrote:

How to assign different policies with a different retention / browse
periods to the same client without creating an identical copy of the same
client? Really I am looking for a way to set retention / browse periods in
the group rather than per client.

Yes and no. This is sort of possible, but not quite 100% complete.

I'm going to digress slightly first. This is very similar to the way
that the schedule is set. As you know, schedule is normally set on a per
client basis, and the client resource includes an attribute to define
the schedule. However, the schedule can be overridden by a schedule
defined in the group resource. If you define a schedule for both the
client and the group, the schedule on the group will take precedence
over the schedule on the client. The way NetWorker does this is that
when the group runs from the NetWorker built-in scheduling tool, it
queries the schedule attribute from the group resource, and if found, it
will add a "-C" parameter to the savegrp command that it runs, and this
is passed down to the savefs command running on the client.

Both the browse and retention attributes can also be overridden from the
group. The savegrp command has the "-w" and "-y" parameters available
for this purpose, and if specified these will override any browse and
retention attributes specified in the client resource. So this is the
"yes" part of the answer.

The "no" part of the answer is that there are no attributes available in
the group resource to correspond with the "-w" and "-y" parameters for
savegrp. So if you schedule your groups from the built-in scheduler (as
most people do) then the functionality to override the browse and
retention is not available to you. This inconsistency in the product has
been an annoyance to me for a long time, and it's high time that Legato
made this small improvement to the product.

The way round this is to use an external scheduler to start your groups
("cron" on Unix, "at" on NT, or something more sophisticated if you
like). This has one or two implications and won't be a satisfactory
solution for all users. However it might just be what you need to meet
your needs. If you do this you must bear in mind a couple of potential
gotchas:
(1) Several other attributes from the group resource will also be
omitted when running the savegrp command directly, these will also have
to be specified as command line options.
(2) You may find the bootstrap save set being saved with every group if
there is no enabled group that includes the bootstrap. You may need to
keep a group running from NetWorker for this purpose.

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