Generating guaranteed retention lock audit reports for cascaded replication in a deduplication backup system

Abstract

A retention lock report generation process creates, upon deployment of a backup server in the backup system, a hidden directory structure in local storage of the backup server. Upon retention locking (RL) of a file, the process writes details of the file and lock operation to a retention lock audit (RLA) log. The RLA log is stored in the hidden directory structure in the filesystem, and maintained as a rotating log containing only a latest timestamped RLA log file. Previous RLA log files are retention locked and stored differently from the RLA log. In a cascaded storage target system, a plurality of targets store copies of the sourced data. RLA log information is generated for locked files at each target for new lock attributes and lock state changes as propagated through the targets for both replication and back replication operations.