Scheduling a full backup every week

[robinRobinson]

Hi,

I've been reading a lot of documentation and articles regarding Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and everyone seems to be avoiding quite important (in my opinion) information regarding how to schedule a full backup every X days.

From what I understand, the Veeam M365 backup grabs a full backup at the first backup try, and then creates incrementals until the retention period expires. If I set my retention policy to keep data for 25 years, will I have only one full backup for 25 years?! That's a bit worrying. What if something gets corrupt at some stage and Veeam will just keep backing it up thinking it's fine?

I can't see any option to configure full backups, either I'm missing something or it's still undeveloped feature?

Is there any way to go around that? Like setting up a retention period for 7 days instead of 5 years and just moving the backed up data somewhere else so it doesn't get deleted?

Thanks!

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Robin,

Correct, it is first full backup and then incremental for the rest of the time. VB365 protects data differently compared to server or desktop backups. In fact, in many cases, you will see that organizations of a certain size and bigger will not be able to protect all the M365 data within one day (with organizations that large where it can take months before the first full backup succeeds). This has to do with the data size (M365 organizations with PB of data are no exception), download speed and most importantly, the throttling. So taking full backups every week is (to start with) not even an option for most organizations.

Retention might be working also a bit differently depending on the option you have chosen (item- or snapshot-level). Be aware that snapshot-level is not really a snapshot (that doesn't exist in M365) but just the retention that works similarly compared to VBR.

[robinRobinson]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your answer. How about smaller organizations? Our concern is that if anything in the backup gets corrupt on the way, and the system won't pick it up, it'll be corrupt all the time. There won't be a new try to backup everything with a full backup.

Another thing that makes me wonder is how is this backup exactly working in the back-end. Having full backup and incrementals all the time seems a bit risky. Whenever I'd need to recover a full mailbox after 5 years, it would take a lot of time putting all the incremental backups together with a full one. I've tried to find any documentation with the exact description of what's going on in the background but without luck. Is Veeam making full backups in the background on their end to create a quicker restoration points or how does it exactly work?