Immutability

[collinp]

I have a backup retention of 90 days for my backup policy in Veeam Backup for Azure. I would like to set the immutability retention period to only 7 days. Is it possible to set the immutability period for a lesser amount than the overall backup retention? And if not, will this be offered in the future? I'm worried about costs with an immutability period that long.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Colin,

The immutability setting is for the entire backup chain, and there are no plans to offer immutability settings less than the retention policy setting.

How do you have your schedule configured? Do you use a weekly/monthly backup schedule, or do you have a purely daily backup option enabled in the schedule?

Thanks!

[collinp]

Pure daily backup.

[collinp]

Would there be a significant cost difference in 90 days of immutability versus 7? It would be great if the technology allowed for a seamless experience where all Veeam backups (on-prem and cloud) had the same option of allowing for a lesser amount of immutable retention.

[lyudmila.ezerskaya]

Hi!

You might consider combining two schedules to meet your needs:

• For the daily schedule, select an immutable repository and set a 7-day retention period.

• For the weekly schedule, you can choose to create backups every day with a 90-day retention period and select a standard repository.

Please note that the weekly schedule will create only one restore point per day, which may be sufficient depending on your requirements.

Additionally, the cost associated with immutability is mainly composed of transaction costs, so the increase in costs between 7 and 90 days should not be significant, especially if the daily backup changes are low.

[collinp]

Ok. That's great information. I'll look into this. The other part I am not understanding is the differences between backing up on-prem vmware vm's with Veeam versus backing up Azure instances with Veeam for Azure related to immutability. If I'm understanding this correctly, If I were to set my retention to 90 days in Veeam for Azure and backup to an immutable storage account then all 90 days of my backups would be immutable. The Azure storage cost "penalty" for this would only be 10 days for block chain. So I would only be storing 100 days of backups maximum. If I were to do this same thing for on-prem backups, backing up to an Azure storage account, and cover myself for the full 90 days of immutability, I would have to set 90 days in the Veeam console under the immutability tab. The storage cost "penalty" would be massive: 90 day backup retention + 90 days immutability + 10 days block chain = 190 days. Forgive me in advance for not understanding the differences.

[lyudmila.ezerskaya]

Hi!
The immutability period for Azure VM backups equals the retention period plus up to 10 extra days to minimize additional transaction costs. For example, if you set the retention period to 90 days and choose an immutable repository, your backups will be immutable and stored for up to 100 days.