Basic/General Question about protected tapes

[NEIN11]

Hello,

I am somewhat new to Veeam B&R, although I have a good understanding of the basic functionality.

I currently have a few GFS Media pools configured, and set to archive a few of our routine backups. Some of those same backups are also configured for automatic upload to an AWS S3 instance.

My question is what effect the retention status has on our AWS uploads. I would assume that the retention policy would augment what is stored on the tapes, and that the data (depending on when the AWS upload is scheduled to take place, and what tapes are designated) would then be moved up to the cloud.

I would appreciate confirmation on that point. My main concern is not fully understanding how the retention policies are managed with the data we have in AWS.

Thus far, my running-config has been setup with the intent of uploading the data (prior to the expiration of the tapes in the GFS pool) to AWS, and then allowing the GFS policy to overwrite the virtual tape for future backup jobs.

Let us also assume that for this topic, that EXPORT option in Veeam for these tapes is disabled.
I understand that exporting a tape will trigger the archive process for AWS long-term storage/AWS Glacier.

If there's some documentation that I may have overlooked please let me know; any clarification would be appreciated.

[Dima P.]

Hello NEIN11

I would assume that the retention policy would augment what is stored on the tapes, and that the data (depending on when the AWS upload is scheduled to take place, and what tapes are designated) would then be moved up to the cloud.

Retention is set for tape media. Since there is no integration with AWS in terms of retention, so I'd rather use never overwrite option to make sure virtual tapes are not erased automatically when imported back from AWS to the local storage.

Thus far, my running-config has been setup with the intent of uploading the data (prior to the expiration of the tapes in the GFS pool) to AWS, and then allowing the GFS policy to overwrite the virtual tape for future backup jobs.

If there is no real need to overwrite such virtual tapes, I'd recommend to delete them from AWS shelf manually (or script this process). Otherwise you have to load them back from AWS to the local storage just to perform erase operation (which will end up in additional costs).