Long Term Retention for backup on a specific date

[tjdoc]

Hi, I'm looking for some assistance on how to configure an image based vm backup job that will take a full backup on a specific date (1st Jan) and apply a 5 year retention to it. The data relates to a specific business process and needs to be retained long term.
However, I'm not sure I can see how this is possible so some guidance will be very helpful.

Basic job detail, GFS and schedule:
Daily backup - forward incremental with a weekly synthetic full on a Friday
Short term retention 30 daily / 30 days immutable
Keep weekly backups for 4 weeks - use the one from Friday
Keep monthly backups for 12 months - use the weekly backup from the first week of the month
Keep yearly backups for 5 years - use the monthly backup from January

If the synthetic full is on a Friday, it won't always be the 1st January.
So, I thought we could schedule an Active Full with the specific date of 1st Jan in addition to the above, which is possible.
But how does that then get the "Y" flag to keep for 5 years? My understanding is this is inherited from the "M" flag, which in turn is inherited from the "W" flag...which is the one from a Friday...so wouldn't be the Active Full backup??

I've seen a couple of other posts similar to this that suggest it can't be done...however maybe I'm misunderstanding? If so, please could someone advise the best way to achieve this?

Thanks very much in advance

[DanielJ]

It's not evident from the GUI, but if you don't select a weekly GFS setting, and select the first week for your monthly GFS setting, then the backup will be taken on the first of the month. If you want any other date than the first, it's not possible as far as I know. Better control over this stuff would be very nice (and has been requested for years).

[david.domask]

Hi tjdoc,

I would recommend an easier way with either VeeamZIP or Export Backup.

Both provide on-demand stand alone full backups with their own custom retention schemes you can set, encryption, can be moved and even archived to archive tier.

If there are a large number of machines to do this with, VeeamZIP can be started with multiple VMs selected from the inventory pane (shift and/or ctrl+click).

I think for your use-case, just triggering a VeeamZIP or Export backup is probably best. Export Backup will produce functionally the same result as VeeamZIP, but Export Backup will avoid additional workload on your production environment as it will generate the standalone backup from existing backups instead of snapshotting your production machines.

With a job it's possible as well -- configure only Yearly retention in the GFS section for the desired years, leave the other GFS periods disabled, and run your backup. It will assign the Yearly flag to these machines and follow the GFS retention.

But consider VeeamZIP or Export Backup, I think a bit less work personally, but there's no "right" way to do this, just what works for you.

[tjdoc]

Hi DanielJ and David - thanks for replying.
The 'hidden' GUI option sounds like it would give us the backup but in order to get a bit of confidence around it, is this feature documented anywhere?

In terms of Export - I've tested exporting a backup to .vbk which includes the VM. However, how would we set a 5 year retention policy on it?

For VeeamZip, if the setting "Delete this backup automatically" is 5 years, does this apply the same sort of retention security as a GFS policy so that nobody can delete it using Veeam or a file system directly?

Thank you

[david.domask]

Hi tjdoc,

You're very welcome for the information thus far.

For Export Backup, you set retention on the Exported Backup as you start the Export. (step 3)

Please observe the note, as you can set custom retention periods if the preset options are not suitable.

>does this apply the same sort of retention security as a GFS policy so that nobody can delete it using Veeam or a file system directly?

If the backups are exported to a Hardened Repository or an Object Storage Repository/Deduplication appliance that supports immutability, the Exported/VeeamZIP backups will be immutable. With Object Storage Repositories, VeeamZIP and Exported backup will follow the same scheme as GFS backups as noted in the IMPORTANT section on the page.

Similarly, if unintended deletion of backup files is a concern, consider enabling Four Eyes Authorization, which prevents manual deletion of backups through Veeam without authorization from the approved authorizers you configure.