Retrospective GFS Backups

[bassic]

I have a backup job that was created before the GFS retention policy was an option for local backups, so was set to a retention policy of 1825 days with weekly synthetic and monthly active full backups to achieve five years retention. I should say this is backing up to deduplicating storage, so has not caused too much of a space issue, although it's obviously not ideal.

We would like to change to a more sensible 30 days, 6 Weekly Full, 12 Monthly full and 5 yearly full GFS policy, but don't want to lose any retention. If I created a backup copy job with these GFS settings, could it be set to go through the backup and copy over the specified fulls and apply the GFS flags to them to separate storage?

[Mildur]

Hello Laurence

You cannot set GFS tags for existing restore points.
And a backup copy job won't allow you to copy the old backups and tag them as GFS accordingly to the month when they were created. There is a reg key to "copy all backups", but it will just copy them as incremental in a new backup chain. Not as monthly full backups. And a backup copy job chain couldn't be mapped to a backup job. If that was your plan.

I think it's best to just start a new chain with a new backup job and leave the old backups until they are out of the retention. It won't use much more storage if your deduplication application provides you with global deduplication and your backups are not encrypted.

Best,
Fabian