My only issue with Veeam Software

[gortees]

Good Evening,

I recently attended an event and had a chance to discuss Veeam products advancements with one of the Veeam technical guys. I have had the opportunity to see a number of enterprise deployments of VMware, without fail most of them choose not to use Veeam due to one simple reason:

- Retention is based on number of backups instead of number of days or a date picker.

They always want Veeam features and support but cannot handle the number of backups. The discussion always goes something like this:
-Well you if you need to keep 90 days you could set it to 100 days and you will be fine in case you take a few additional backups
-My policy says I have to keep 90 days and if I miss that I will loose my job.

So then we get into a discussion about changing their policy and culture and another backup product becomes the choice. You have a great product. I personally think it rocks. For the last two years I have been mentioning this to every Veeam person I meet and they say it's not a major pain point. I know it's the line every other product uses against you. I was told to voice my thoughts here since you take these comments to heart. I am just trying to improve your product and provide my customer the best possible options. Please feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

Thanks,
Joseph Griffiths VCDX-DV 143

[Shestakov]

Hello Joseph,

Thank you for kind words, we really appreciate it.

We receive the same feedback about retention policy periodically, but also a lot of people and me personally find restore point-based retention policy more sane.
So I would continue the dialog you`ve started in this way:

-Well you if you need to keep 90 days you could set it to 100 days and you will be fine in case you take a few additional backups
-My policy says I have to keep 90 days and if I miss that I will loose my job.
-You can easily calculate the exact number of restore points and to feel secured you can use simple powershell script to delete all backups were made more than 90 days ago.
-You are right, now I don`t have any reasons not to use Veeam B&R.

Thanks again for your feedback, we will take it into account.

[Vitaliy S.]

Have you considered using backup copy jobs for archival purposes (such as 90 days) and use regular jobs targeted to the fast production storage and keeping restore points, for example, just for 1 week for restoring most recent data? In this case you will always have a copy of your backups in the secondary location (which is considered to be best practice) and have retention policy based on days.

See this link for more info > http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/v ... arget.html