Prelude Initially, I wrote this about Backup Exec, because that's where I ran into this problem. I'm also a SAV & SEP veteran but don't recall seeing this heinous language in their KB articles. So maybe it's a Veritas thing. But, whatever... ...then it occurred to me that while BE may (or may not) be the only Symantec enterprise product to which the symptom applies, the cure is universal. Because it bridges a huge gap between the goals of Symantec Sales, Support, ...

The principle of RS's pointer system makes for a very useful form of deduplication. They could easily start competing with other products that offer global deduplication if they could have a single full backup, and then deltas permanently from that point on (never deleting the original snapshot). Basically, a 0 day expiration, with hopefully the ability to archive the system to tape for long retention if you wanted to delete it (i.e. a store closes and you need to maintain the data, but not ...