7 year retention policy

[Hepkat]

Hi everyone,

So, we just recently made the switch from Veritas Backup to Veeam and so far I'm loving the Veeam experience. Much faster and vastly more efficient - we should have made the switch years ago!

However I'm having some difficulty understanding Veeam's long-term retention configuration. My client is an architect office with a legal 7 year retention requirement, but they'd prefer to retain files as long as possible. We have one Windows backup repository in house and a second off-site. Veeam has a 9999 retention day policy for VMs, but for physical machines that changes to only 730 days (why, I have no idea!). Since we're backing up a mixture of VMs and physical servers, I figured I'll have no choice but to use GFS, but this is where things get tricky. There's no clear, easy to understand instructions for configure GFS. All the guides I've looked up online only leave me with more questions than answers, include the official ones from Veeam.

Could someone please explain the best way to configure daily backup jobs for physical file servers so that all files get retained for a minimum of 7 years? THANKS a lot!

Regards,
Kurt

[david.domask]

Hi Kurt,

Image level backups (VM and agent volume level backups) are meant to capture the state of the GuestOS at time of backup -- so such backups will contain the file versions that exist at time of backup. So if the periodic schedule of the image level backups is sufficient for the clients, set GFS to retain data for the desired time at the frequency of backup that works best for you.

For more granular file level version tracking, Unstructured Data Backup is more ideal, and is meant to be run frequently for consistent protection of the file shares, and also has the ability to [url=https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbr/u ... hive"files for longer retention[/url].