Store archived backups as standalone fulls?

[JHuston]

Is anyone using this option that can explain a scenario when you would enable this and why?

I'm setting up Azure archive tier to offload my backups from Hot capacity after 180 days and store them for 10+ years. It's a pretty large data set 1.1PB total over the last 4 years so I want to save space but don't want to compromise my backups long term.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

The reason this option exists is non-technical: some of our customers face internal policies and external regulations requiring the archival of GFS full backups as standalone copies. These rules cannot be argued from technical perspective: either the backup software meets them, or it does not (and then it cannot be used). The fact that they were created 30 years ago based on storage realities of that time does not matter to anyone

Whereas archive redundancy in the on-prem backup world is achieved by having fully independent GFS backups to eliminate dependency and avoid issue when a particular block goes bad, with object storage the redundancy is innate because every object is automatically and transparently stored in multiple copies across availability zones. And should one of those copies corrupt, another one will be served transparently to the client. As such, there's no good reason to create additional copies also on the backup software level. But, some folks may have other thoughts and consideration, while for other it just helps to sleep better at night. Which is why we provide an option.