Guidelines for planning Snapshot copy schedule and retention for SnapVault backups

It is important to plan the Snapshot copy transfer schedule and retention for your SnapVault backups.

When planning SnapVault relationships, consider the following guidelines:

• Before you create a SnapVault policy, you should create a table to plan which Snapshot copies you want replicated to the SnapVault secondary volume and how many of each you want to keep.

  For example:

  • Hourly (periodically throughout the day)

    Does the data change often enough throughout the day to make it worthwhile to replicate a Snapshot copy every hour, every two hours, or every four hours?

  • Nightly

    Do you want to replicate a Snapshot copy every night or just workday nights?

  • Weekly

    How many weekly Snapshot copies is it useful to keep in the SnapVault secondary volume?

• The primary volume should have an assigned Snapshot policy that creates Snapshot copies at the intervals you need, and labels each Snapshot copy with the appropriate snapmirror-label attribute name.
• The SnapVault policy assigned to the SnapVault relationship should select the Snapshot copies you want from the primary volume, identified by the snapmirror-label attribute name, and specify how many Snapshot copies of each name you want to keep on the SnapVault secondary volume.