Immutable Backup Retention Policies

[OMansour]

Hi All,

I‘m using B&R quite for a while now. But now i want to secure my Backups a bit more.

My B&R Version is 11.x

I‘m trying to understand how this immutable Object Storage works. When i started to create my S3 Bucket there where an option under Object Lock called „Default Retention“ which i let disabled. On the otherside there is the option for retention while creating the capacity Tier in B&R under Scale-Out-Repository.

1. Do i have to activate the option in my S3 Bucket (Compliance Mode = x days) and the retention period in B&R. ???

or

1. Do i leave it disabled (S3 Bucket) an just configure the retention/immutable period in B&R ???


2. When i set a period of 18 days ( that means 18 + 10 - correct me if i‘m wrong) 28 day totally, when does the 28 days start to count. My Backup is as follows: Friday Full & Mon -> Thu Incrementall (next week same).
Do the 28 days start on Friday (when Full is done) or Thursday (when last Backup of Chain is done) ??

Thx in advance
oliver

[Andreas Neufert]

Immutability is set by Veeam on object level. Bucket level immutability on the bucket itself should not be activated as Veeam set and manage the immutability.

You define the Immutability in x days in our interface and all restore points within those days are protected. I guess your question comes from the area where we update immutability settings every 10 days for all the objects that need to be protected. This is just a mathematical thing where we project how many updates we need to do vs. cloud costs and had a specific sweet spot there. This does not mean that you have extra 10 days immutability.

[vashthestampede]

Hi Adreas, could you please can be more specific, "This does not mean that you have extra 10 days immutability." in the offical docs i read that you add ALWAYS 10 days to the immutabily set in the Object Storage.

I'm struggling to understand when and where you add these extra days, but i'm still confused. I have the same scenarios of user OMansour in the first post.

[Andreas Neufert]

Yes, we add up to 10 days additional days immutability to objects that we store in the object storage.
We do not store backup files in objects, we store backup blocks in objects that can be part of many restore points. This allows us to perform incremental forever processing and upload only the daily changes (minus compression).

The above mean as well when you upload the initial full, that many of those objects continues to be part of newer restore points and get "linked" to those newer restore points. This would mean for most of the blocks we would have to daily update the retention time then, as those blocks belong to the newest restore point as well. And repeat that daily when new restore points will be convered. This would cause a big burden on the storage in case of IO and would be as well expensive in public cloud environments. Therefore we add for some of the data additionally up to 10 days of immutability so that we do not have to update the data on a daily base for huge number of objects.

Depending on the timing you could have some additional days protection (not for all of the data) but this is not relevant for your planning. For some of the data it can be only a single day or hour additional protection and then after the update 10 additional days on the next day, then counting down again and after 10 days the data is again additionally protected.

For your restore point planning you can just ignore this and set it up in a way that the Immutability and Retention setting reflect what you want.

[vashthestampede]

Thank you for the explanation.
My need is to store in the capcity tier (immutable as well) only the last few days of my backup, as emergency restore; but with the rule of 10 days added it's hard to preview how many restor epoint will be stored as immutable, this also for cost point of view.

Have you any suggestion? Let's say for me could be enough to store in the capcity tier immutable the last 7 restore point, this is possible?

[Gostev]

Then just set your immutability period to 7 days in the repository and don't worry about those extra few days added, as in the end the only reason this logic is in place is to reduce the overall bill and save your money, as opposed to having you spend more!