Retention Questions

[cdfosburg]

Hello All,

I am new to Veeam and I am coming from CommVault and I am little confused about the retention polices for Veeam.

Here is my scenario. I have VM File servers that contain a disk that is HR data. I have setup a policy in order to backup just that disk, but with the retention policy, I want it to be longer than 14 days. I am looking for a full on Friday, and incrementals on Sat - Thur.

Let's say I want to be able to go back 6 months in order to get data. Would I put in 182 days for the restore points?

Thanks,

Chris

[foggy]

Considering you need to be able to restore to any day within 6 months back, yes.

[cdfosburg]

So it will string them together as well during that time? For example it will have everyday available which is made up of inc - Sun - Thursday and Full Friday.

[foggy]

Correct.

[dellock6]

I know I'm being pedantic here, but remember that number is "number of restore points", so it equals to number of days only if you run the job daily.
For example you said in your example to have full on friday and incrementals sunday-thursday. If you skip saturday, you will have 6 jobs per week, so the 182 restore points will last for around 30 weeks, or almost 8 months.
Also, with such a long retention period, I'd suggest to look at the new forever forward incremental mode (if you are using v8), in 6 months it means to save the space of 25 full backups since it has only 1 full and an entire chain of incrementals.

[foggy]

Chris was not going to miss Saturdays in his original post.

[dellock6]

Oh, right, on the next reply sat became sun, my bad. But nonetheless, it's a total number of restore points, not a retention based on age

[cdfosburg]

You are right I miss typed lol. Sorry about that. But you guys have been very helpful in determining how to manage this.

Thank you!

Chris

[cdfosburg]

Can I ask one more question please?

Can you change the retention policy on the fly? And if yes, what does that do to the VM's? Both if you shorten it or extend it?

[dellock6]

Yes you can change retention on the fly.
If you extend it, simply new retention points are added to the chain.
If you shorten it, at the next execution the oldest restore points will be removed as they are beyond the new required retention.