Understanding GFS Backup Job Settings

[sxld]

Hello, looking for some assistance in understanding the the correct way to use GFS settings. New to the product, have gone through some brief training, but nothing that went in detail on configuring GFS, long term backups, & proper scaling/sizing.

The project I'm working on roughly has the following specifics:

• 30 VMs across a handful of hosts under a single vCenter server
  Retention needs for each machine varies, some cases 30 days, some 7 years
  No offsite backup, VBR running on a single server (off-domain)
  Backup jobs run nightly

I believe I understand what's needed for short term retention jobs (30 days), which would look like so:
Backup Job > Specify VMs with same retention needs > Specify Repo | 7 restore points, GFS 4 weekly, 1 monthly

What confuses me is how to approach the longer term backup needs in this situation. My assumption is:
Backup Job > Specify VMs with same retention needs > Specify Repo | 7 restore points, GFS 4 weekly, 12 monthly, 7 yearly

Even more confusion when it comes to properly sizing/scaling the VBR server. I've used https://propartner.veeam.com/restore-point-simulator, but given the lack of yearly options, I don't think the tool covers this usecase (please advise if I'm way offbase)

Any assistance or direction that can be offered here is appreciated. New job, went through VMXP and VMTSP, in no way feel prepared to build something like this out.

[PetrM]

Hi Sam and Welcome to Veeam R&D Forums!

1. You don't need to enable GFS for short-term retention (30 days), it's enough to set the desired number of restore points to keep on disk or the number of days for retaining restore points. Also, I recommend to read this section of our help center to get a better idea of different backup chain modes because it directly affects the number of restore points that you will have on disk.

2. If you want to apply long-term retention policy, you should activate GFS and select how many weekly, monthly or yearly backups would you like to retain. The main concepts of long-term retention policy are explained here.

3. For sizing purposes, you may consider the size of one yearly backup equal to the size of full backup. Therefore, if you decide to retain X yearly backups, you should provision (X * SizeOfFull) space on repository.

Thanks!

[foggy]

3. ...unless you're using a repository with enabled deduplication of some kind.