Long Term Retention Details

[edvanek]

Hello,

We are starting to migrate from an existing backup solution to Veeam and have a question regarding the long term retention.

Our existing solution backs up data and its retention is done based on generations. This allows it to be configured to keep a single version (or more if wanted) of a file forever. We have customers utilize this for legal reasons to make sure no files are ever lost/deleted. If it existed on the server during any backup, there is a version of it in the backup.

From my understanding, Veeam does not work like this. It does have GFS options to get close to this, but I wanted some clarification on how it works.

If a customer is keeping 1 backup a month for a year with GFS. Lets say on the 1st of January we keep a full backup with this retention. Now lets say someone puts a file on the server on the 2nd of January, then someone deletes the file on the 10th of January. The daily backups would catch this file on the server, but would the full backup on February 1st have that file? or would we only have the data that was on the server as of February 1st?

Does this sound correct, or am I missing a feature of Veeam that would do what we are looking for?
We want to be able to restore that January 2nd file a year+ later, even if it was deleted from the server and hasn't been in a backup since the 10th.

Thank you

[Mildur]

Hi Edward

You are correct. This is how Veeam works with vm and Agent Backups.

If you need to keep File Versions, have a look at the NAS Backup Feature. It works differently. You can configure how long to keep a version of a file.

NAS Backup - Retention Settings

Nas Backup - Retention Scenarios