Netapp Snapmanager for SQL - setting different snapshot retention settings for different backup jobs

Netapp Snapmanager for SQL is an amazing product. I personally love it. Snapmanager allows you to SQL aware snapshots for the databases residing on the Netapp LUNs. It goes without saying that you have to follow the best practices for setting up the LUNs with databases and log files on separate LUNs for each instance to have this work correctly. The Jobs can be scheduled as SQL jobs or windows tasks. We can set retention on these backups according to the number of backups and number of days.

Now when the retention is simple, something like 7 days or 10 backups, it is fairly easy to specify that. However, the retention for our backups was a little more complicated than that. We required backups to occur every four hours at the business hours and retain those backups for 7 days and than have a once a day backup with a retention of 42 days. So in other words a four hourly backup for 7 days and a daily backup for 42 days needed to be the retention period. This is where the management groups come into place. Snapmanager for SQL has whats called backup management groups that allow you to set up different retention period for different backup jobs.

So for the 4-hourly backups we used the 'standard' management group. Under 'Backup' > 'backup and verify' > 'backup management group' - the option 'standard' is selected from the drop down.

For the daily backups we change this option to 'daily'. So when Snapmanager deletes the backups older than 7 days for the 4 hourly backups, it understands the daily management group and does not delete the backups under the 'daily' management group. That way we can have separate retention for different backup jobs.