Ever need to adjust the browse/retention time for a saveset, but you’ve not been sure how to do so? Here’s how.
To change the browse or retention time, you’ll need to find out the saveset ID (SSID) of the given saveset. This can be done with mminfo.
For instance, say you had a backup done last night of a machine called ‘archon’ that has now been rebuilt, but you want to keep the old backup for much longer than normal – e.g., ten years instead of the normal 3.
First, to find out what you need to change, get a list of the SSIDs:
# mminfo -q "client=archon,savetime>=24 hours ago" -r name,ssid
name ssid
/ 4036558666
/Volumes/TARDIS/Yojimbo 4019781450
/Volumes/Yu 4003004234
(If you’re confused about that savetime command, see my other post here.)
Now, for each of those SSIDs that are returned, we’ll run a nsrmm command to adjust the browse and retention time*.
The basic nsrmm command for adjusting the browse and retention time is:
# nsrmm -S ssid -w browse -e retent
or, for a single instance of a saveset:
# nsrmm -S ssid/cloneid -w browse -e retent
Where the ‘browse’ and ‘retent’ values can be either one of the two following:
- A literal date in US date format ** – e.g., “12/31/2019″ for 31 December 2019.
- A ‘fuzzy’ english worded date – e.g., “+10 years” for 10 years from today.
Note that (rather obviously), your browse time cannot exceed your retention time, and generally its recommended that you set browse time to retention time.
So in this case, you’d run for each SSID or SSID/CloneID you want to affect:
# nsrmm -S ssid -w "+10 years" -e "+10 years"
Which will look like the following, based on my mminfo output:
# nsrmm -S 4036558666 -w "+10 years" -e "+10 years"
# nsrmm -S 4019781450 -w "+10 years" -e "+10 years"
# nsrmm -S 4003004234 -w "+10 years" -e "+10 years"
It’s that simple.
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* You can also do this against an instance of a saveset by using the SSID/Clone ID; to do that variant, request “-r name,ssid,cloneid”, then use the two numbers in the nsrmm command separated by a forward slash – ssid/cloneid.
** The restriction on US date format may have eased in 7.5. I’m going to do some additional playing around with locales sometime soonish.
