Backup_Copy job and changing GFS Strategy

[onthax]

Hi Veeam,

Currently have a backup copy job that does

monthly for 24 months
yearly for 5 years

Recently the customer has changed to want

monthly for 0 months
quarterly for 8 quarters
yearly for 2 years.

my thought is that changing the job to this configuration would cause the monthlies to be deleted and the yearlies to roll down to the last 2 yearlies.

Or will Veeam BR convert 8 of the monthlies to quarterlies and clean up the rest?

[HannesK]

Hello,
The software keeps the restore points as they are and only cleans up what is not needed. Conversion would cause massive IO operations that would have negative impact.

As we remove the quarterly option in V11, I would suggest to talk to the customer again about these changes.

Best regards,
Hannes

[onthax]

Great, so expectation it will clean up the monthly points that aren't required for quarterly retentions.

so end result of configuring the job should just be just the 8 monthly that align to the quarters and veeam will clean up the others?

[HannesK]

correct. we clean up everything that is not needed

[foggy]

If you disable monthlies, they will not be deleted automatically, you will have to delete them manually.

[onthax]

Thanks HannesK and Foggy,

Will be able to run with that, and cheers for the heads up on Quarterly removal with V11.

What will happen to any other jobs configured that way?

[foggy]

Do you mean removing the GFS flag in the regular backup job GFS policy? Provided the backup file does not have any other GFS flags assigned, it is subjected to the regular short-term retention policy.

[onthax]

how about existing backup copy jobs that are defined quarterly?

[foggy]

If you disable the quarterly retention, you will have to delete these restore points manually (provided they do not have any other GFS flag assigned).

[foggy]

If you disable monthlies, they will not be deleted automatically, you will have to delete them manually.

That is not completely true, it is the case for disabling the entire GFS retention where Veeam B&R allows to keep the restore points on disk prompting the user for decision. In the case where you just set the number of GFS restore points for some period to 0 (or any value that is lower than the current one), the corresponding restore points are deleted according to retention at the end of the next job run. This will change in the upcoming v11 though, where in both cases it will just warn the user about deletion without the ability to keep the backups.