Long Term Backup Retention

[TshepoM]

Hi All

I have a requirement according to my company to create a backup job that will with the follwing requirements.

1. daily full file backup (this means backup of only a specific directory on the server eg. /root/backup
2. All files in this directory gets deleted every night and get recreated with totaly new files meaning a encremental will mean everything being backed up.
3. Keep all the daily restore points for 5 years meaning they will require a restore of a specific date and specific file
4. The company does not do monthly files as we delete the files everyday.
5. We deployed veeam 9.5 and lots of dell disk storage. we dont have tape backup

What is the best and safest way to backup this kind of a job.

Regards.
T.Mohulatsi

[Shestakov]

Hi Tshepo and welcome to the community!
Are we talking about physical or virtual machines?
Thanks!

[TshepoM]

Hi Shestakof

at the moment it's physical and virtual machines
but our strategy is all virtual machines in a couple of months to come. can you provide best practice for both.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the clarification.
The best practices depend on your goals a lot.
I would recommend starting from this article.
Feel free to ask additional questions.

[TshepoM]

Hi Shestakov

My Company has decided to get rid of tapes and run backup only on disk we do have a tape solution that we planning to
let go of as we want to go disk only

What is your take on keeping 5 year retention on disk.

Regards

[Shestakov]

If you want to achieve long term retention on disk repository, GFS retention is the way to go for you.
As for absence of tape storage in context of the above-mentioned article, cloud repository is one of the best alternatives.
Thanks!

[ChuckS42]

So, how about converting existing long-term retention backups from another product to VAW? I can easily restore the backups from the old product then back them up with VAW, but they will be one-off backups that will never expire on their own. Is there any way to "trick" VAW to treat them as long-term retention backups from the original server (which will have a VAW job using GFS copies), so they'll expire normally? Or am I stuck deleting them manually (for the next seven years...)?

[Dima P.]

Hi Chuck,

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to map the backup copy produced backup files to the VAW backup job, so that wont work.

[TshepoM]

Hi Guys

Im thinking of doing monthly veeamzip of a virtual machine that is requiered to be kept for 7 years.
can someone please advise if this would be safe since i want to do a extreme compression on the job.
and also considering that it wont be a backup chain making it a bit safer but im open for advice.

Regards

[stueng]

Paid, Windows Server Agent Backups

I've read the manuals and looked at the forums, the best I could find is someone simply saying "use a GFS retention" - retention policies dont seem to come into Agent backups, at least I cant see where?

All I see is the number of generations of a backup to keep. How would one achieve a typical GFS of say:

10 days
6 weeks
12 months
4 quarters

With the Windows Agent? the only option available is number of backups? and advanced options to use synth fulls.. but again no actual retention policy?

Surely VEEAM have not released a fully paid agent based product that you cannot have a simple retention policy against?

[DGrinev]

Hi Tshepo,

Sorry for the late reply.
It seems you are using the free version of Veeam B&R, then you are good to go with the monthly VeeamZIP.
However, you can handle with the described scenario by using backup copy job with the GFS retention in the paid version of the product. Thanks!

[DGrinev]

Hi Stuart and welcome to the community!

In the current version of the product there is only simple retention available.
Please review this thread for additional information, you will find a useful links in the posts above. Thanks!