Backups Retention Period

[GarrettL]

Hi Guys,

Maybe I just missed it and am very blind but can anyone clarify on the "retain backups for x years" and does this reference how many years you're backing up for or, how many years back each person's mailbox goes and retention is based upon that?

I'm assuming the latter but wanted to play it safe.

Thanks!

[Mike Resseler]

Garret,

Let's say an email comes in today, and is being protected today through the scheduler. However, you decide to delete that email (after the backup of course) and never look back at it. The retention means that it will be available for recovery for X year.

So, every backup you take (let's say daily), the state of the mailboxes at that point in time will be available for those x amount of years.

Makes sense?

Mike

[GarrettL]

Mike,

That helps quite a bit. I was worried if it was going with age of contents within a mailbox of potentially risking not having the full state of the mailbox backed up as we have companies who have 10+ years of mail.

Appreciate the clarification!

[foggy]

No, this relates to the backup files retention, not their contents.

[Kostya]

I was worried if it was going with age of contents within a mailbox of potentially risking not having the full state of the mailbox backed up as we have companies who have 10+ years of mail.

Sorry, guys, but it is related to the age of content. Literally it means "keep mail items until they become older than retention".

• I.e. if you have a message received older than retention period it will be skipped on backup.
• And once other mail items become older then retention period they will be removed from repository.

[GarrettL]

That changes things quite a bit...

I noticed the DB folders increasing (e.g. 2011, 2010+) when increasing the retention and hence I was curious about this. It does get me a little concerned that I can not ever truly backup a mailbox then and especially for eDiscovery when longer than 7 years. Maybe a feature request moving forward?

Can we confirm this is accurate as it does vary from Foggy and Mike's posts.

Thanks!

[Kostya]

What retention would be OK for you?

[GarrettL]

I would argue that it'd be best to do retention similar to what Foggy and Mike had mentioned. You should never have to be concerned at whether the mailbox in its entirety is there but the changes being are to be placed into retention. We haven't seen any of our O365 backup vendors using retention the way it's currently configured with Veeam. I'm kicking myself for just pulling two of our vendors in favor of Veeam but now losing anything 7+ years out

[Gostev]

Maybe a feature request moving forward?

Correct. I am sure we won't need 7 years to increase the retention limit, which is fairly random right now to be honest... it was 3 years in alpha, then someone asked for 7 years and we've done it (devs did not want to do a bigger increase until they see how the current engine behaves in the field).

[foggy]

Garret, sorry for confusion, I've also misinterpreted the logic based on the option name ("Retain backups for"), we need to rename it to reflect the actual behavior. For better understanding, think of it as Outlook's AutoArchive option.

[GarrettL]

Foggy, no worries at all and appreciate jumping back in too. I'm excited regardless of the potential in the product and it's still a great start and we'll still deploy this to probably 20+ companies to start and see how it matures.

[Mike Resseler]

Garret,
What is your actual preference and based on what reason? (legal, compliance, logic...). Just for our understanding and interest
Thanks
Mike

[Gostev]

Garret,

Would the following retention value be sufficient for the companies you're working with?

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25

Thanks!

[Deckers]

I was excited to be able to get some protection going on our pilot mailboxes, but after working with the product for a couple days I'm pretty disappointed in the retention strategy (as I understand it). What I would expect to be able to do is restore/explore a mailbox from a certain point-in-time. More of a snapshot concept rather than the message level archive approach this seems to employ.

I'd say it's common for people to save important messages over the years and they way I'm understanding this, Veeam is going to ignore the messages in my mailbox that are older than X years and either not back them up or age them out of the backup even if they are still in my active mailbox.

If the retention age is only applying to the items that have been permanently deleted by the user then I think it will work as is. It's just not clear from what I've seen so far.

[bryanmeche]

Not sure where to post feature requests, but we actually need retention far lower than a year. It'd be nice if we can customize the value to any number we want, instead of having the presets. Ideally we'd like to keep backup retention for only seven days.

[Mike Resseler]

Bryan,

Seven days is really low. Are you planning to keep the data for longer through backing up the VM or is this the only requirement for your emails?

[bryanmeche]

Hey Mike,

It's the only requirement for our emails. We consider email transitory and we don't consider emails to be records so have pretty tight email retention policies in that all emails should be purged unless end users save them as records. We use Exchange itself to recover accidentally deleted items, but once an email not tagged as a record reaches 90 days we want it permanently removed and don't want it to exist on Exchange or in backups.

We just want to use Veeam O365 in case Microsoft decides to have a catastrophic failure with a mailbox or several mailboxes and can't recover emails at all. We don't want to use it to recover accidentally deleted items or retain items.

[Mike Resseler]

Bryan,

Would it be OK for you if we can provide retention with a monthly timeframe? So in your case 1 month. I know it is more than 7 days but there are certain things to keep in mind for the backend

Let me know, so I can talk to our DEV's about this

Thanks
Mike

[bryanmeche]

One month would be a lot better than one year for our needs, for sure.

However if possible though I think it'd be great to allow admins to define retention by days, similar to how Exchange does it with retention tags. If you wanted Exchange to retain items in a folder for five years, you set it to 1825 days. It really would give customers a level of granularity to fine-tune if needed while allowing customers to retain for periods like they do today who don't need that level of fine-tuning. Perhaps keep the same values in a drop down box with an other option and the ability to enter retention in days manually. Anything you can do is appreciated!

[Mike Resseler]

Bryan,

I will discuss with our engineers to see what we can do on a short notice. No promises though

Mike

[masonit]

Wow took me awhile to catch this, How retention works in VBO. Didn't really expect this... So you are saying that retention only works after create date of the mails and not from when mails was deleted? I guess set retention to "Keep forever" would mimic how retention work in VBR. All active data will always remain in backupdata..

But for example if I would have retention to "Keep forever" and a user would permanently delete a mail. After 14 days that mail would be removed from Recoverable Items in Exchange online. What would happen to that mail in VBO? For how long would I be able to retreive it?

\Masonit

[Mike Resseler]

Magnus,

In your example, that email will be kept forever as that is your retention range. Well, not in the mailbox of the user obviously but in your VBO backups