Long term daily backups to S3

[DanielJ]

I have a case where we are required to have daily VAW backups to S3 for 10 years. It's easy enough to put 3650 days in the settings, but no backup chain should be that long. If we break it off with monthly active fulls we will get too much data after a few years. And as far as I have understood it, synthetic fulls aren't a thing on object storage. The GFS settings will require active fulls to work. Is that correct? Or is there actually a way to create a synthetic full on S3 in order to start a new backup chain?

[Mildur]

Hi Daniel,

Since you asked in the Veeam Agent subforum, I assume you are using our standalone Agent. If not, please let me know and I will move your question to the “managed agent” forum.

The synthetic full option does not exist for object storage, but it is also not required. Active full backups are also not mandatory to enable GFS settings.
Veeam Agent will create an incremental backup and will link existing blocks on object storage to the new GFS restore point rather than uploading completely new blocks. This is basically the same concept as a synthetic full: reusing already uploaded data blocks.

Best,
Fabian

[DanielJ]

This is for managed agents. Does this mean that VBR will see the backups as several independent 1-month chains? What I'm after is to minimize the risk of metadata corruption which probably would be quite big with a single chain of thousands of restore points.