Sorry to add to this thread with what seems to be the same question over and over again. I read through the
GFS documentation for retention policies and I'm still not all that clear on how the backups will be stored.
I need to keep a daily copy of my backups for 7 years. Meaning if in 6 years I want to restore files from today I'd be able to do that. To simplify things lets pretend I have enough storage for this and don't need to offload to tapes. For example lets say I have 1 VM that is 1TB in size.
So I create the regular backup job and set the restore points to keep to 7. If I understand correctly this will do incrementals each day and after 7 days create a new full backup.
Then I create a backup copy job and point it to my archive storage. The options I have for keeping restore points are: Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly.
How do I populate these so that I can have 2555 days of data? Simply putting in 2555 restore points seems like a bad idea (since there would only be one full backup and 2554 incrementals). This seems like any restore operation down the line would take a really long time.
If I set the restore points to 2555 and create 4 weekly backups, 1 monthly, and 1 yearly will I have a a total of 4 full backups (1 for the weekly, 1 for the monthly, and 1 for the yearly)? Or does Veeam just need one full backup to meet the retention needs of all the different job types?
I realize that in production I will need to offload to tape as 2555 days of data with 30GB changing each day is over 76TB (and I am looking in to offloading to tapes as I write this). But I'm trying to get an idea of some best practices when our regulatory needs require such a long chain of backups.
Thanks.