Feature Request - Force Retention

[spookydoor]

I posted this request in the general forums and I was encouraged to post it here as well. I have quoted the original post, below:

"I work pretty heavily with backups in my current role, and we use your product and another product with some of our clients. The other product has a feature that is incredibly helpful and I think would be an amazing feature to add to Veeam. How feasible would it be to add a “Force Retention” feature?

I really believe we need this for situations when we run into low disk space. In Veeam’s current state, if I run into an issue where I need to reclaim disk space, I am forced to break my backup chain and delete data. If I could lower retention on my backup and then force retention, that would effectively eliminate the need for me to have to lose data and break a backup chain. For example: if I am in a situation where I am getting failures due to low disk space, and I have retention on said backup job set to 30 days, if I could cut retention down to, say, 20 days, and force retention, I could maintain my current backup chain and then address the disk space issue accordingly (adding more disk space or some other solution). If I have to run a backup to get retention to occur, I am crap out of luck because I don’t have enough disk space to run said backup and I am forced to delete data and break my backup chain.

This feature would be amazing and I would genuinely appreciate it if you would consider it and potentially add it. It is a needed feature and would be incredibly helpful.

Thank you for the great product and hard work!"

[Gostev]

Thanks, I think we can re-purpose the engine behind one of the new v11 features to enable this, at least for GFS backups.

[spookydoor]

@Gostev

I'll take what I can get. This would be great for all backups, but if GFS is the best that can be done, I'll take it! How feasible would it be to add this feature for all backup types?

[Gostev]

I think it's feasible.

[nkeibler]

Came here looking how to force retention, only to find it's a request and not a feature yet. Agreed, this would be most useful.

[Gostev]

In v11, you can't force it yet, but if you change GFS retention in the job then it will be automatically applied to GFS backups during the daily GFS retention processing at night.

[inferno66]

Hello,

I've enable montly GFS Retention on my backup jobs (i already have Weekly Retention setup),configured to use weekly backup of the first week of month, but apparently my November backup (first week) only have the Weekly tag and not the montly

Veeam V11a
Regards

[Mildur]

The tags will not be applied on existing backups.
Have you configured the monthly gfs after the „the first week“ of november or after that weekend?