Drop off of old offsite backups when onsite no longer being done

[McKITGuys]

Hi all,

We have offsite backups (both "regular" and immutable) of a set of VM servers that are no longer being backed up (these servers are obsolete). The 2 servers are in one backup job and that backs up onsite and then there are 2 copy jobs to copy them offsite (one to a 30 day "regular" backup and one to a 90 day immutable repository).

Given that it seems Veeam has to run a job for it to get rid of old restore points, what do I need to keep running so that the offsite backups have the old restore points continue to drop off i.e. erased?

- can I take both servers out of the onsite job but leave that job enabled?

- but that would not seem to work because the copy jobs are triggered by the onsite job and if there are no VMs in the onsite job, I assume the job never really does anything (it starts, finds there are no VMs and finishes); to get around that, do I change the copy jobs from "immediate" copying to "periodic" to get around that?

Or do I have to do something else?
Thanks

[david.domask]

Hi MckITGuys,

Consider letting Background Retention handle these by detaching the backups from the job.

This will move the backups to the Backups > * (Orphaned) node, and then Background retention will apply as per the 1st link I shared above. If there are other machines in the job you need to still protect with these jobs, you can:

1. Create a "dummy" job with some place holder machine added
2. Use the Backup Move feature to move these backups to the dummy job.
3. Proceed to detach the backups from the dummy job
4. The Backups will be in one of the Orphaned nodes, and Background Retention will apply

[McKITGuys]

Realize this is an older thread - not able to get back to this for some time.

Regarding this thread, if detach the backups from the job, does this work for offsite cloud jobs (one of which goes to a "regular" repository and another of the same data that goes to an immutable repository. The documentation seems to indicate that it does not apply to copy jobs (or maybe it is referring to one-time copies).

Thanks,
Albert

[david.domask]

Hi Albert, no worries on delay.

The "Copied Backups" in the user guide page I linked refers to the Copy Backup operation which results in a 1:1 copy of the backup in another repository. Not to be confused with Backup Copy Jobs.