Lifetime Retention

[sheehanje]

We just got notified that we may need to keep some of our departments files indefinitely. This poses some problems- mostly because while we can certainly obtain storage to do the job, when a user deletes a file the file is no longer backed up and indexed - so without knowing exactly when that file was deleted it would be hard to figure out a point in time to restore to.

Does anyone know of a way to do file versioning for long periods of time. I think VSS is good for smaller windows - but I'm not sure it would be idea over the long haul. We can get a large deuping device (something like an exagrid) - and while I plan on still using Veeam to backup the file servers from our VMWare infrastructure, I will need a way to achieve the lifetime retention of about 100 - 150 home directories. Robocopy I don't see a way to version with. Is there something similar that will do this?

Thanks in advance.

[Gostev]

Hi, John - I know it does not help you now, but this capability is something we're working on as a part of v10. Thanks!

[Delo123]

Hi John,

we have kind of the same issue, for us its files which have been overwritten by newer code outside of any repositories...
Anyway, what we do is simply backup the Vm's with Veeam and keep them on deduped Windows volumes residing on big "cheap" JBODs.
We have one Fileserver which is around 2TB and still have all fulls / incrementals of 2 backups per day since 2010 when we started with Veeam:)
Since it's all the same VM (and thus same files) it's actually pretty good dedupable with windows. The maximum Volume size is around 62TB, after that you need to switch to a new volume.
As example one of our Fileservers takes up 31TB on Disk but actually these are 168TB's of backup files, so nearly indefinite backup files are possible like this.

[antony]

Hello,

At the moment VEEAM is able to make a backup of network folder but it is not able to do versioning, ie to keep several versions of a backup. We are therefore obliged to go through other software like COBIAN .. Our wish would have been to use VEEAM to do this too. Do you know if this improvement is planned in a future version?

I find that this is an option that is cruelly lacking in VEEAM to become complete.

Regards,

[gingerdazza]

Maybe you need to look a Rubrik. All backups fully indexed including those in the archive cloud

[Delo123]

Yes, but you also need a big big big bag of money...