Feature Request: Real retention periods, and compression

[billcouper]

Hi,

If I set up VBO365 with a 3 year retention, then come back to it in 2 years and 364 days, the oldest retention point will be 2 years and 364 days old BUT only contain one day of email - not everything that was in the mailboxes at that point in time.

This makes 'points in time' almost meaningless and I fail to see what the 'point' of them is.

Please make VBO365 retention work like every other backup software in the world (and certainly every other Veeam product).
Use the powerful compression of VeeamBR to maintain retention similar to how regular backup software works.

Speaking of compression, does VBO365 even do any? Size of backups on disk are greater than expected (based on our experience with VeeamBR we were expecting a good compression ratio).

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Bill,

The discussion on retention is a hot topic . You are clearly preferring the image-based type of retention from our B&R solution while others prefer the retention we use in VBO because it is not image backup but data backup. Inside we are still debating how to solve this issue in the long run. I gently disagree with you on every backup vendor as lots of backup/ archiving solutions that only protect specific data work the same way. But as said, it is a hot topic


For the compression: This is a running database and not a flat file as you are used from VBR so we can't use that compression. We use internal compression of Jet DB where the data is stored. The compression saves us about 15%. However, that is internal in the DB. For example, if your DB has 1 TB of data inside, and the next run old data is removed and it only contains 500 GB, then it will still show 1 TB on disk because inside the DB the space is given free (and will be used again) but the size on disk remains the 1 TB. Besides the data, we also store metadata in the DB so that also makes it larger than the actual size


Hope it helps
Mike

[billcouper]

Is there a supported method of compacting the DB?

[Mike Resseler]

Bill, there is one, which will be renewed when VBO 2.0 is out. But for now, we will do this through support (if you have 1.5 you can do it through support today). We are seeking a way to get this integrated into the product for future versions but there is one part in the procedure which makes it very difficult for us to automate it

[Robvil]

i would love to see a retension scheme as we know from B&R. We need to have backup of all exchange data no matter how old they are - but have no need to save deleted mails older than 3 years.

[F182]

I agree with the OP. We use a competing product for backing up O365 at the moment, and we can go back to any "day" in the retention period and see all the email from an email box for that day and any day prior (as if we are looking at the email box on that particular day).

Veeam is a lovely product and the company and people that work there as well. I would love to see the O365 backup work to this, what we would call, baseline functionality.

[Mike Resseler]

Farzon,

When you choose a restore point, you also see the email box for that day and any mail prior to that as long as it is within retention range. But I heard you here all loud and clear

[Peejay62]

@Mike : An old discussion but anyway: is there in the mean time a functionality available to perform compaction on the jet db as mentioned earlier? I wonder if you succeeded in making this available,

thanks, Peter

[Polina]

Hi Peter,

No, there's nothing new to it. As Mike said, we can't compress a live database, and honestly no plans in that direction.

Thanks!