Update to v8 (probably) deleted the whole Repository

[msobm]

Just a head up to everyone who is using Veeam 365.
I had a Repository for which there was no active Jobs anymore. The Job was disable about 2 Years ago.
The retention was set to 1 Year (Snapshot based).
The Job and the Repository were never deleted because we would like to keep the Data as an archive.

Now i just checked the Repository and all Data is gone.
The Job was never run since we disabled it 2 years ago and the Data was definitly there, because I restored some files last Year.

I suspect that when upgrading the Repository after the Veeam v8 Update the Data was deleted because it will fall out of the Retention period.
The Repository Files have been Updated with a timestamp of the v8 Update so i suspect that this was the cause.
Maybe this is expected, but i was not aware that Data can be deleted without running any job. Realy bad design.

Just as an FIY, maybe there are other people around here that are not aware of this.

[Polina]

Hi Michael,

I am sorry to hear about your situation. It looks like a misunderstanding of some basic product concepts rather than an issue caused by upgrading to a new version.

The retention mechanism works independently regardless of whether any backup jobs are configured. Retention runs by schedule even if no new data is written to a repository. If you want to disable retention, you can set it to 'Keep forever' - with this option, all the existing data will remain in the repository and not be cleaned up. Additionally, there's an option to copy your existing backups to a secondary repository (which could be a cheaper storage) with a longer retention and use these copies for archival purposes.

With a 1 year snapshot-based retention, retention should clean from the repository all restore points that are older than a 1 year from now. And since there were no fresh backups during the last 2 years, all restore points were considered outdated (which is a valid behavior).

Does it make sense?

[msobm]

Hello Polina

Yes that makes sense. I definitly was not aware of that (as you can see), thanks for that information. I still don‘t think that this is a good idea to execute any retention on it‘s own, but at least i know it now.