Suggestions on 7 daily, 4 Weekly, 3 Quarterly, 1 Yearly job

[squebel]

Someone sold one of my customers this retention that they should have never approved and now we're basically legally stuck with it and I can't get the customer to adjust for a few legitimate reasons. The retention that was sold was: 7 Daily, 4 Weekly, 3 Quarterly, 1 Yearly. Now, I know quarterly is not something that is supported any more (Booo!) so that alone is an issue. The other major issue here is that a few of these servers are very large and we need to benefit from block cloning (refs) as much as possible which we are today so I'm trying to avoid Active Fulls. We have 490TB of restore points sitting in just 128TB of space which is fantastic. What we have done is set the job GFS setting on the job to 4 weekly, 12 monthly, 1 yearly and then manually pruning off the ones that are not Jan/Apr/July/Oct but that is really not sustainable or manageable. So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone can come up with any kind of magical job configuration that could fulfil this retention and avoid Active Fulls


p.s. - if we could still do quarterly, I wouldn't be having this problem. There are customers out there that want quarterly to reduce their restore point count and backup data usage but can't lose all their data for say 6 months or more by settling for a 3 month, or 6 month and then a yearly. As an MSP, we pass on backup size charges to customers and report on the amount of logical restore points their backups represent. Less restore points means smaller bills which is important for some customers which is why quarterly would be a nice option to have in cases like this.

[Mildur]

Hello Squebel

We have requests to bring back quarterly backups. I'll note yours as +1.
Unfortunately there is no ETA or targeted version yet.

What we have done is set the job GFS setting on the job to 4 weekly, 12 monthly, 1 yearly and then manually pruning off the ones that are not Jan/Apr/July/Oct but that is really not sustainable or manageable. So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone can come up with any kind of magical job configuration that could fulfil this retention and avoid Active Fulls.

A backup copy job which runs every 3 months could be a solution today. But it requires one additional active full backup. Besides that, I don't have any other idea.

Best,
Fabian

[tyler.jurgens]

Went through this with a customer. We convinced them to just go with the 12 monthly backups, as that still allows for them to keep their quarterly requirements (and then some). Since you are already using block cloning with ReFS, you can be reasonably assured the additional space used will be marginal and could provide a discount if the costs are an issue. It would be worth it as there is currently a cost to you to prune out old backups and run Active Full backups, which you would no longer need to perform.

[squebel]

Hello Squebel
We have requests to bring back quarterly backups. I'll note yours as +1.

Fabian, thank you. What was the technical reason for removing quarterly restore points in v11? It seems like just another tick on an object in the database or is it more complicated?

Yeah, the copy job is an option but not a great one. I think what we're doing is honestly the best thing we can do right now. I might try to script something that gets run on a scheduled basis that deletes the extra vbk's and then does the cleanup in the repo and catalog.

[squebel]

Tyler,

Right, but the problem there is now this customer has 8 extra Full backups for their vm's where each month's Fulls represents about 60TB of logical restorable data. When you pull that number back from Veeam and pass that onto the customer, that's an extra 1400TB of backups they have to pay for but don't need. Yes, the consumed space increase is negligible because of refs but it's the restorable space that goes up exponentially and results in a higher bill which the customer is no willing to pay for. It's a product/billing issue at that point but if we could just do the quarterly, it would fix our issue

[tyler.jurgens]

Completely understand. Unless you can bill on only consumed space (which isn't easily possible now), you're left giving a discount to the customer based on what you can safely assume is used data. Eg: "Dear customer, we'll give you 60 TB for free because you're so great and Veeam no longer performs quarterly backups. That's the amount you would consume now by having 12 monthly backups. You now have more backups for free! Aren't we amazing???!"

Not an ideal situation by any means, but one you could implement today rather than hoping for a change to bring back quarterly backups.

[squebel]

Actually, that's a great idea on the free quantity. We could likely take a pretty decent guess and what those extra restore points would represent and just take that off of their contracted amount. Thanks for that idea!