Feature Request: Change retention or export Backups

[mr_bjo]

Hello everyone

We would like to request a feature which would allow us to keep certain restore points for a longer or indiviudal time.

For example, if we delete a VM, which gets backed up by a policy with only 10 days of retention, we might want to keep it's last restorepoint for a prolonged time.

In the past, we used Veeam Backup and Replication, where we could export a specific restore point as a full restore point and keep it until we manually deleted it, or set an auto-delete option. However, with Veeam backup for Azure, old backups are automatically aged out according to the retention policy, even if we don't want them to.

Therefore, having the option to adjust the retention period or export a specific restore point would be beneficial for us and other customers.

Thank you and kind regards
Joel

[nielsengelen]

Hi Joel,

Do you have VB for Azure integrated with VBR? As you could use backup copy jobs to have a longer retention for those points at the moment.

[mr_bjo]

Hi nielsengelen

Thank you for your response.

We tried using the backup copy funktion in VBR. The problem was, that it's not possible to select individual VMs or resporepoints to copy.

This means we would have to copy the data of up to 300 VMs which would not be efficient.

So sadly, unless we did something wrong, this is not a solution for us.

[Vitaliy S.]

Joel, can you please clarify how you determine which restore points/VMs to copy? What's the scenario you have in mind?

[mr_bjo]

Hello Vitaly

Of course I can.

To keep it simple let's just assume all of our vms are in a single policy which has Backups enabled and a daily retention of 5 days.

The most common scenario we face is the deommissioning of vms. If the vm is not needed anymore, it gets deleted from azure with all its disks and data. While decommissioning. the vm owner often wants us to do a "last backup" which should be kept for lets say 1 year.

We can't fulfill this request, as the last restore point already has a retention set by the policy (5 days). So there is no simple way to keep the last restore point (or any restore point within the backup chain) for a longer duration than the retention of the policy defines.

Another scenario is, if a vm or an application running on it gets some critical updates. The application team often wants to keep the last backup which was taken before the update for a longer period than the default retention.

In VBR we could use the export backup function which allowed us to export a restorepoint of a single vm as an individual vbk file. This file we could store on our own terms or use the autodelete option.

We tried the same with Veeam Backup for Azure but we were only able to copy the whole backup chain instead of single vm restore points.

It would be very beneficial to have an option to either adjust the retention period for a specific single VM restore point, or to export a specific VM restore point separately from the rest of the backup chain.

[Rouxls Kaard]

Hello,
Adding that I too would like to see this feature implemented in the Azure appliance. It would be great to retain or export a one-time backup of a VM.