Feature Request: manually set GFS flags on vbk

[mtooth]

Hello Everyone,

I would like to be able to manually set GFS flags on the backups already present in repositories.

Here's my case:
We have a job which is supposed to keep 12 monthly and 10 yearly restore points.
We have some full backups already stored in a SOBR with M flag dating 12 months back.
The oldest one is February 2023 marked M.
My issue is that the job should have stored the January 2023 backup, marked Y but for some reason it's not there.
I don't know what's the reason, maybe an initial misconfiguration of the GFS policy, but the January 2023 restore point is lost already.
I would like to be able to mark the available Feb 2023 restore point with Y flag in order to keep it for 10 years but there's no such possibility.
Not even by editing the Veeam Config DB by Veeam Support - they denied such option.

My only option is to export this restore point without autodelete option, and keep it for 10 years (potentially forget about it and keep it indefinitely).
While this is some kind of solution the exported backup is 4.56TB large.
The restore point is located in the capacity tier of a SOBR.
Exporting this restore point produces a synthetic backup in the capacity tier, which eats another 4+TB of S3 object storage space.
This export > synthesize operation does not re-use already off-loaded blocks, therefore there's 4+TB space wasted, instead of just marking a restore point with Y flag.

While my case may be very uncommon, I still believe that setting GFS flags on full backups would be a nice feature.
While exporting a backup is a good way to keep an increment for a custom period of time,
why not allow similar retention customization for full backups already present in the repos?
You don't need to synthesize anything, no additional waste of storage space.
Just set a custom GFS flag to keep the full restore point until a certain date.

Best Regards!

[DanielJ]

+1 on this. I don't think it's that uncommon, I would have had use for this feature many times. It seems like such a simple thing to allow setting these flags (not necessarily allow clearing them).

[Mildur]

Hi Michael

Thank you for providing your use case.
I will add both your votes to the request.

Best,
Fabian

[wizardict]

If you could add my vote too please. I guess the option to manually set an extended retention date would be best for us. We occasionally have the need to retain a backup longer than the original retention (for example if we know a major change happened on that date that may need referencing in the future) so the option to retain for x days, weeks, months, infinite would be great.

[Mildur]

Hi Mark

What sort of storage do you have in use? ReFS or XFS?
Your use case "We occasionally have the need to retain a backup longer than the original retention" can be solved today in the product. If you do an export to the same location with reFS or XFS, we will use FastClone. Spaceless and fast Export of a restore point.
Available retention periods for the export wizard can be adjusted since v12.1: https://www.veeam.com/kb4537

Best,
Fabian

[wizardict]

Thank you, that's useful information. We currently use the export method, but I don't think we've needed to use it since upgrading to V12 so I wasn't aware of the retention setting. Most of our storage is NTFS, which is probably why we haven't seen the FastClone feature, though we do now have some ReFS and that will be our default for any new storage going forwards.

It would still be easier to mark the retention on an existing job

[dfap96]

Adding my vote too. I use veeam backup for nutanix and have upgraded to V12 just recently. With the previous version, GFS wasn't an option for nutanix backups so we had to set a huge short-term retention period (999 points) in order to meet our long-term retention needs. Now we're on v12, we would like to reduce short-term retention to only 30 days and implement GFS configuration for long-term, what is not possible as reducing short-term would remove all weekly full backups produced over more than a year. With the option of assigning GFS flags manually, the effort of exporting those full backups and setting specific retention periods for each one of them could be avoided.