SUMMARY
Explains what min or max retention limit alerts mean and next steps.
ISSUE
You see alerts in the Administrator Interface reading “server name has protection above/below maximum/minimum retention limit of X days.”
RESOLUTION
For additional information on managing retention settings in the Min/Max/Hold retention model, see How to configure retention settings on Unitrends Backup
has protection below minimum retention
To resolve this alert you may take one of the following corrective actions, depending on the cause (see below)
- Adjust the number configured under Manage Retention for "Warn when less than" to be less than or equal to the oldest backup of the protected asset which triggered the alert.
- Consult the capacity report (found at Reports > Appliance > Capacity Report) and determine if there is unique data that can be removed from the appliance to make way for changed data on other protected assets which may be more critical.
- When removing unique data you must remove all backups associated with the protected asset to remove its impact from your capacity, removing the oldest backup will have no effect and is often more detrimental than removing the most recent backup.
- The capacity report indicates the undeduplicated, uncompressed space consumed by one full backup of every protected asset on your appliance, as measured by the size of the last successful full backup of those protected assets.
- Depending on the model of your appliance and whether it is a physical or virtual appliance, the total unique data should at most be anywhere from one-third to one-half of the total available space in order to maintain any significant retention beyond the initial backup set; this can be affected by many factors, not least of which is the change rate of your incoming backups.
- Consider adding additional storage space to your appliance (virtual appliances only) or upgrading to a larger-capacity appliance.
has protection above maximum retention
To resolve this alert you may take one of the following corrective actions, depending on the cause (see below)
- Enable the backup job under Jobs > Job Manager and allow it to continue taking backups again.
- Adjust the schedule under Jobs > Job Manager such that the full backups run more frequently to allow the purging to occur within the limits, or adjust your retention settings such that "Delete backups after" is set to a number of days to allow for a new full backup to be landed on the appliance.
- If the server has been decommissioned either remove the retention settings altogether so that you can keep the last backup of that server without receiving the alert, or remove the remaining backup(s) for the decommissioned server if they are no longer needed.
- Investigate the cause of the new full backups completing with a warning (yellow) or failing (red) and address that to get new successful (green) backups so that the prior successful backup(s) can be purged.
- Run a new full backup; this is most useful if the server has been protected with an incremental forever strategy and the synthetic full backups have been completing with warnings due to prior warnings in the backup chain.
For more on retention settings, see About retention control in the Recovery-Series and UEB Administrator's Guide and/or KB 4664.
CAUSE
has protection below minimum retention
This alert is triggered when a protected asset does not have successful (green) backups which are at least as old as the number of days configured for minimum retention, by using the "Warn when less than" setting in Manage Retention. Possible causes for this are:
- The minimum retention setting has been configured to require a number of days which the appliance has not yet attained for this protected asset; for example, the protected asset has only been backing up for 3 days but has a minimum retention set to 7 days.
- Backups were manually deleted. This can be for a number of reasons from users deleting backups to backups needing to be removed as a part of a maintenance operation guided by support. In these situations the appliance needs to continue taking backups until a proper history of backups is acquired.
- The appliance needed to purge backups early to avoid running out of space. In this scenario it typically means that due to either the change rate of existing protected assets, the addition of new protected assets, unplanned addition of unique data, or backing up too much unique data, that the appliance must purge some protected assets ahead of the minimum retention period or fail incoming backups.
has protection above maximum retention
This alert is triggered when the backups of a protected asset cannot be purged because there are not successful (green) backups available on the appliance to replace the current backup as "last backup" when using the "Delete backups after" setting in Manage Retention. The appliance is hard-coded to keep the "last backup" (including any dependent backups - incremental backups depend on any prior incremental backups back to and including the prior full, and differential backups depend on the prior full) and will not purge if a newer successful backup is not present - keeping in mind that the full chain of backups must be purged at once, i.e. the full backup plus any dependent backups. Possible causes for this are:
- The backup job has been disabled, thus preventing new backups from occurring.
- The backup job has scheduled fulls, but they do not run often enough to allow a new full to be received on the appliance before the retention period has lapsed.
- The protected asset has been decommissioned, lost connection with the appliance, or has otherwise been prevented from backing up.
- The protected asset has new backups, but they have completed with a warning (yellow) or have failed (red), and are not viable replacements for "last backup" for this protected asset.
- Synthetic full backups (usually on an incremental forever schedule) have been completing with a warning or failing altogether, usually due to warnings being present in the incremental backups.