Specifying Retention Periods in the Media Policy

The primary purpose of a media policy is to specify retention periods for your media. A retention period consists of the length of time that BRMS protects media from rewrite before expiring and returning it to the scratch pool. BRMS protects media from rewrite through the end of the specified retention period.

There are multiple prompts on the media policy display that pertain specifically to retention:

• The Retention type field specifies the type of retention method you want to use. For example, BRMS can hold media until a specified date or for a specified number of days. BRMS can also hold media through different save versions or on a permanent basis.
• The Retain media field specifies the time period through which you want media protected from rewrite.
• The Deleted library retention field specifies how long a version should be retained after BRMS has detected the library no longer exists on the system.

BRMS designed these elements to work together. For example, when you specify a value of 2 (days) in the Retention type field, you must specify an actual number of days in the Retain media field, for example, 25. BRMS expires the media after the date or number of days has passed, or the number of versions exceeded.

Using the Retention type of Versions, allows you to have retentions based on the number of saves you have of that item. If you want to have three save versions of LIBX, BRMS will not expire a saved item until you exceed that number. A fourth save of LIBX would force the oldest save of the LIBX to expire. Sometimes libraries that are saved, but do not stay on the system actually only get one valid save version, and therefore since BRMS would require 3 versions, the save would never expire, nor would the media that it resides on. This causes the media to potentially never expire. The Deleted library retention field can assist in these situations. Use wisely since you may indeed want that media to stay active.