Question about supported AWS S3 Standard-IA

[dgriffith]

Hello,

Our Veeam implementation uses capacity tier with AWS Standard S3 storage with immutability enabled for 30 days for redundant backups. Due to increasing costs with S3 Standard I have a bunch of questions about what's possible so I can ensure we have our backups configured correctly. Forgive me if some of these questions have obvious answers, I'm new to Veeam as my knowledge comes from using Commvault in the past.

Is AWS S3 Standard-IA for capacity tier backups an option?

Is S3 Standard-IA configured when I add a new backup repository?

Can I have two repositories connected to the same S3 bucket. One with S3 Standard and the other with S3 Standard-IA? My thought is to transition backups over to S3 Standard-IA and let data age off normally from S3 Standard. Will this require reseeding of the backups?

I saw this guide mentioned in the forums https://www.vladan.fr/fight-ransomware- ... y-feature/. In the screenshots the checkbox for "Use Infrequent access storage class (may result in additional costs)" has a warning that infrequent access is best suited for quarterly and yearly backups. I thought S3 Standard-IA has a minimum retention time of 30 days and you are charged if you delete data early. Will this be fine as my retention time in Veeam is 30 days?

Currently costs for API calls with S3 Standard is fairly high, between 30% to 40% of total AWS backup spend and we are used to this. If we change to Standard-IA will this change the number of API calls?

Is S3 Glacier an option if we wanted to store backups for longer periods of time?

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

For questions that are asked often, there is the sticky FAQ. The selection of infrequent access class is part of the wizard when you add new object storage.

Can I have two repositories connected to the same S3 bucket. One with S3 Standard and the other with S3 Standard-IA? My thought is to transition backups over to S3 Standard-IA and let data age off normally from S3 Standard. Will this require reseeding of the backups?

no, please requirements and limitations documented in the user guide

Will this be fine as my retention time in Veeam is 30 days?

yep. but many customers have much lower retentions. that's why we have that warning in the wizard

Currently costs for API calls with S3 Standard is fairly high, between 30% to 40% of total AWS backup spend and we are used to this.

that's not normal, but can probably be explained by non-standard block size and immutability (see FAQ linked above)

Is S3 Glacier an option if we wanted to store backups for longer periods of time?

yep, also covered in the FAQ and the user guide

If your primary goal is to reduce costs, then I recommend looking at alternative object storage cloud providers (Wasabi and Backblaze are popular on the forums). that's the biggest leverage you have.

Best regards,
Hannes

[dgriffith]

Hello Hannes,

Thank you for the welcome and quick reply.

I've brought up Wasabi as an option as it would be much more cost effective. If we decide to stay with AWS and switch to Standard-IA will we encounter issues if we don't use GFS fulls?

[HannesK]

Hello,
as I cannot predict the future, I cannot give a 100% answer... but in general it's fine to go with IA as long as the retention is longer than 30 days.

Best regards,
Hannes