Long-term retention of VeeamZIP files for Legal Holds

[philfreund]

I am going to be using VeeamZIP files to provide storage of VMs for Legal Holds. Do I need to plan to keep a copy of the installation files for Veeam B&R (including the current B&R Update) so that I can recover the VMs five or more years from now? I realize that there could also be issues with VMware compatibility at that time but that's a separate problem.

[Shestakov]

Hello Phil, to restore backups you need Veeam Backup and Replication, yes. Any product version can restore VMs, including free edition.

[philfreund]

But will that still be true in four to five years? For example, could a backup taken with Veeam B&R 5.0 in 2010 be restored today with B&R 9.5?

[Gostev]

Yes, so far we've maintained the compatibility. However, to be absolutely sure, you can just save the tiny extract utility along with the VBK files. Thanks!

[philfreund]

Great! I'll just include the extract utility as recommended. Thanks!

[philfreund]

Please clarify one thing about the Veeam extract utility: Does the restore of the VM from the .vbk file assume that the original source datastore(s) exist on the target host with sufficient space to hold the VM at its original size? If not, what datastore is used to hold the extracted VM?

[Gostev]

It does not extract VM files to a datastore, but rather to a local or shared folder that you specify. You can then copy the extracted VM files to the hypervisor if required, or for example just crack open virtual disk file in-place for file level recovery.

[philfreund]

One more followup question. When you extract the VM files from a VeeamZIP vbk, how much space is needed to hold them? Is it the same size as the original allocated space? For example, I have a 4.5 TB VeeamZIP vbk file that was created from a VM that had a total of 9.1 TB space allocated in a datastore. Would I need 9.1 TB to hold them? If not, how would I estimate the space required?

[foggy]

It should take the same amount of space as the original VM (unless you select different disk format upon restore).

[philfreund]

Thanks.

[Gostev]

Note - not always the same amount, sometimes more - for example, it will "inflate" thin disks (simply because thin disk is a VMFS-specific feature).

[cfizz34]

What if I want 5 or 7 years, the only options I see is 3 years.

[Gostev]

For custom long-term retention, I'd suggest not enabling VeeamZIP retention, and just delete the backup file manually when the time comes. For convenience, you can move such backups into a special folder named with the date/year when those backups are OK to be deleted.

Also, for such a long retention policies, you'd probably want to use tape from reliability perspective... that is, if you actually care to be able to recover from those backups after so many years, as spinning disk is not a particularly reliable long-term media.