Backup Retention...

[SyNtAxx]

I'm used to setting retention policy like in the old days on tapes/media pools, by telling the application when the data should expire and no longer be protected. I'm struggling to find the best way to meet my companies goals with veeam retention policies. It is very likely i'm overthinking/over complicating the problem. We use a 30 day rotation backup cycle for daily backups. We keep month ends for 2 years. The first part is easy enough set the backup job to retain 30 points of data if I can spare it on the primary fast disk location. But what about the month end job retention(s)? Assuming I use a backup copy job and GFS what would my settings be? Replication interval 24 hours?

Weekly: 30 ?
Monthly: 24 ?

I suppose I could use VTL and set up media pools and use retention policy I'm used to. I'm looking for the best way to achieve my companies retention policies. My only issue with copy jobs is they run continuously, and some backups are only conducted once a week. I realize, and I think i saw a thread about using powershell to enable/disable copy jobs. I just *need* to make sure my data is protected for the appropriate amount of time.

I'm interested in any/all opinions.

Thanks,

[Shestakov]

Hello,
You need to set 30 as the basic retention and 24 as a monthly and set synchronization interval = 1day pointing the backup copy job to the target backup job.
You don`t need to turn it on and off periodically, it will copy daily backups from the source job to its own chain and will keep monthly Full copies for 2 years.
Thanks!

[SyNtAxx]

Thank you for your quick reply. I am reviewing some of the other GFS threads to make sure I understand correctly, as well as rereading the manual. So lets say for example I create a new backup job today and run the job after creation. the backup job is set to retain 30 data points and a weekly active full is created. I then create a backup copy job and offload from primary backup location (fast disk) to long term storage (HP StoreOnce) and set the copy job settings as '30 points' and 24 monthly. I set the 'monthy' backup retention to be first friday of the month, which happens to be today. When the backup copy kicks off, it will copy a the data from primary to target and create a full backup/restore point and be the first of 30 configured points to retain in the copy job. Will it also me marked as a monthly retention, or not because there are 29 more data points needed to satisfy the 30 data points in the basic retention of the copy job ?

Thanks,

NIck

[SyNtAxx]

So my jobs ran and created backups with a "WM" designation for weekly/Monthly retention. There was a failed vm in one of the jobs which i resolved. After that last retry was successfull the backup copy job immediately copied that missing vms copy point. That data was trasferred as 'R' for regular I presume. How do I set that 'R' to be a W/M aka weekly/monthly retention point? Is there a manual process or script to do so after the fact ?

Thanks,

NIck

[Gostev]

R stands for Recent (basically, this for the main retention counter that you set in the Backup Copy job settings).
Created restore points will be marked W/M/Q/Y automatically so long as they match your GFS schedule.
Thanks!

[SyNtAxx]

I'm not sure my question was entirely answered. If a vm failed and exhausted the retires, but was run sucessfully *after* the GFS scheduled data, how does one go about marking the vm that was missed for the appropriate retention? Example, last evening was our month end processing. a single vm in one job failed and was not backed up. I manually resolved the issue and completed the backup today (saturday). The Month End Trigger Date for GFS is set for first friday of the month. the vm was copied but only has an "R" and should have "W + M" How does one resolve that?

Thanks,

NIck

[Gostev]

Sorry, not quite sure about exception handling logic. Most likely, the most recent available restore point will be used, but to be absolutely sure we'll need devs to review the actual code. One thing for certain, there's no way to manually set GFS flags on restore points.

[WRS2200]

Thank you. This thread was very helpful. I was having issues meeting the retention policy procedures set for a few of our clients. I can now assure them that what they have asked for is possible. Thanks again.

[foggy]

There's currently no exception handling logic for such situations. Only VMs that are currently stored in the restore point at the moment it is used to create GFS point from it will be there.

[SyNtAxx]

Veeam (the company) doesn't consider that a gap in coverage ?

[foggy]

There's probably a place for enhancement.