[FR] To make the Obsolete Snapshot Cleanup a Policy setting rather than a global setting.

[Justin.christjohn]

Our current environment includes about 75 accounts, most are separated between Production and Non-Production. Our non-prod retention is only 2 weeks and we have customers stating that once an instance is terminated, the want no more than 7 calendar days of retention. However, we have production accounts with 1 year retention and customers want to decommission systems and keep the final backup for the full year of retention. This causes a conflict with the obsolete snapshot removal feature since it is set globally rather than at the account or policy level. Today we have to manually remove the "obsolete" snapshots from our non-prod accounts and that takes up time and resources that are better spent elsewhere.

[nielsengelen]

Hi Justin,

Understood the use case. I fear that the only workaround (besides manually deleting them) would be to run 2 VB for AWS where you have 2 types of retention or create a script that could potentially do this. I'll verify internally if there is maybe another solution and will report back.

Regardless, we'll look into how to handle this for a future enhancement of the product to make it easier.

Thanks!

[claudiohipolito]

Hi Nielsen,

Based on the discussion in the Veeam forum regarding making the Obsolete Snapshot Cleanup a policy-level setting, I would like to check if there is currently any workaround or script available to achieve this behavior in Veeam Backup for AWS.

We have a customer with multiple backup policies and AWS accounts, each with different retention requirements. Since the obsolete snapshot cleanup is configured globally, the customer is concerned about enabling it because of the risk of a snapshot being removed based on the global retention setting while it may still need to be retained for a specific policy or workload.

Do you know if there is any existing workaround, PowerShell/script, API-based solution, or even a supported configuration change in the Veeam Backup for AWS appliance configuration files, that would allow us to apply obsolete/orphaned snapshot cleanup only to specific backup policies while excluding others from the cleanup?

Any existing solution or reference you could share would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cláudio Hipólito

[nielsengelen]

Hi Claudio,

Any snapshot that is still relevant to any policy or retention will not be removed by the obsolete snapshot feature. This will only remove any other snapshots that fall out of place.

[claudiohipolito]

Hi Nielsen,

Thanks for the clarification.

Just to confirm, does the same behavior also apply to RDS database snapshots?

In other words, if an RDS snapshot is still relevant to an active backup policy or its configured retention, the Obsolete Snapshot Cleanup will not remove it, even though the cleanup setting is configured globally.

This is particularly important for our customer because they currently retain their RDS protection exclusively through snapshots and do not export RDS backups to S3.

Thank you very much.

Cláudio Hipólito

[nielsengelen]

Yes, it applies to all snapshot types created by Veeam.