What is the best way to retain long term backups?

[MSlunecka]

We have a file server that backs up hourly during business hours. It's configured using forward incrementals with synthetic fulls. It is stored on a server 2012 R2 server with windows deduplication enabled to keep disk space manageable.

Right now it's keeping the maximum of 999 restore points. I think this isn't the right way to go about this.

I would like to set it up so that it keeps the hourly backups for a few days or maybe a week, and then only hangs onto dailies for about a month, and then weeklies for about 3 months. Beyond that I don't much care, but I could hang onto a monthly for about a year I suppose.

I don't quite see how to set up Veeam to do this. Do I use the Backup Copy feature? I've never worked with a backup system that doesn't have that kind of archiving system available.

The problem I'm seeing is with collapsing the backups into a daily / weekly. Since Veeam is only doing a synthetic full once per week is there some sort of process that can collapse all of the hourly backups within a day into a single daily incremental file?

[Shestakov]

Hello Matt,
The best way to keep backups is described in 3-2-1 backup rule article. Please get familiar.
To follow the rule you need to use Backup Copy. And for backup copy jobs you can implement GFS retention policy with its flexible retention strategy and choose an appropriate number of weekly, monthly, yearly backups to keep.

The problem I'm seeing is with collapsing the backups into a daily / weekly. Since Veeam is only doing a synthetic full once per week is there some sort of process that can collapse all of the hourly backups within a day into a single daily incremental file?

You can use replication job for critical VMs + daily incremental backups.

Please review provided links and don`t hesitate to ask additional questions. Thanks.