Feature request: disable retention policy / restore point deletion

[Marijn]

Dear Veeam Developers,

It would be good to have an option to stop the retention policy from deleting any restore points for a specific job.

This for the situation that an disaster happens and the datacenter/server/NAS needs to be rebuild. In such situation it will take some time to get the necessary hardware ordered/delivered/configured before data can be restored. During that time no data should be deleted to ensure that restores are possible.

I understand that disabling the job will stop the retention policy too but when starting up again it makes sense to enable the job again so that the already restored systems are protected. Enabling the job for the restored machines will then reactivate the retention policy and delete old backups ... even for those machines which were not restored yet.

A manual option to enable/disable the retention policy would prevent this. Maybe even show the status of the retention polcy in the jobs screen with a little green/red icon?

[veremin]

But can't you simply increase retention for existing jobs by a period required for infrastructure rebuild? This should provide results similar to what you've requested. Thanks!

[foggy]

Do you mean retention by days and starting the job after it didn't run for a long period? Otherwise, I don't understand the scenario as retention will not delete old backups if the job doesn't run and new backups are not created.

[Marijn]

@veremin: I was under the impression that once backups are made with a certain retention set updating the retention doesn't work retro-actively. Meaning only the new backups would get the "new" retention but the existing backups would keep their "original" retention period. Please correct me if i'm wrong here because this would indeed solve my issue if it works as you describe.

@foggy, yes.

Simple example:
day 1 - server1 and server2 full backup with single job, retention 28 days
day 2 - dc burns down, jobs are disabled.
new servers are ordered and 1st new server comes in on day 40
day 40 - restore server 1, enable backup job to ensure new server is protected.
day 41 - ?? what happened to the backups of server2, did the retention policy delete them because it's +28 days old? Would increasing the retention policy to 100 days have kept the backups save?

[veremin]

Nope, unlike independent standalone restore points (veeamzip, exported) the restore points within backup chain does not have self-contained retention - these restore points use the retention specified in the job settings. Say, you want to cleanup your storage, cause it starts lacking free space, what you can do in this case is to go and decrease job retention, during the next backup cycle a new retention scheme will be applied and points falling outside it will be removed.

The same works in the opposite situation: the current retention is too short and you want to preserve the existing points longer, then you can simply increase retention period.

Thanks!

[foggy]

new servers are ordered and 1st new server comes in on day 40
day 40 - restore server 1, enable backup job to ensure new server is protected.
day 41 - ?? what happened to the backups of server2, did the retention policy delete them because it's +28 days old? Would increasing the retention policy to 100 days have kept the backups save?

New servers will have different IDs so will not count against the old ones. Old servers will be subject to deleted VMs retention. Also, keep in mind that the daily retention policy retains a minimum of 3 restore points.