I think the only way you can do this is by having folders for each year.

If you had a folder for each year then you could create a seperate vault store for each year and design your archive policy for each of folders retention

To archive in the way you want you need to be able to create two vault stores. Assign each vault store to the same folder, apply two archive points to the same root folder and then have seperate policies and tasks for the same folder

Then you would need to be able to archive the same folder twice so archive run 1 will get anything older than 3 years and archive run 2 will get anything newer than three years

I have never tried it but I'm pretty sure the software cant do that

BUT

If you can move the data around on the folder and seperate the data into folders like over 3 years old  and another under 3 years old then you can have seperate vault stores and tasks with different policies. Then you could achieve what you want to do

 Hi, I take you mean the Vault Store data (not the file server data?)

If so, what alot of customers do, is close off partitions ever quarter, or every month - or when they reach a certain size.  That way the data can be bettered managed for backup.

Now with EV8, things are alot simpler.
1. The data is stored on disk via archived date (used to be modified date).
2. There is automatic vault store partition rollover - so you can rollover to a new partition based on disk size, free space, time or on a certain date.

John

Hi

I can see that this is an "older" thread, but have you seen the EV Best Practice Whitepaper for backup?

http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/m...

Cheers
Michel

EV best practice whitepaper for backup's is great for initially understanding the various objects and such that need backing up, and makes some great recommendations, however it doesn't go into too many details about how to deal with the long backup times of very large NTFS based vault store partitions... hence the other features I mentioned, and also why various customers use some kind of rollover scheme for their vault store partitions to prevent very large ones from needing to be backed up too regularly.