GFS policy assignment in a already existed backup chain

[eduzimrs]

Hi Guys,

I've got an situation where a customer of ours need to change the Backup Job behavior in order to save repository space.
He has a Backup Job with 365 days of regular retention, so he wants to change it to 14 days and enable the GFS flag as follows 4W/12M/5Y to purge most of the backup files and keep some GFS, the main question here is to understand the chain behavior...

- Veeam will keep only 14 days and purge the rest of the files?
- Veeam will keep 14 days and apply the GFS flags to the chain? keeping 4W/12M/1Y ?
- Something else?

Thanks guys.

[Mildur]

Hi Eduardo

Veeam will not tag older backups with the gfs flag after you set up long-term retention (GFS).

If your customer had a forever forward incremental chain, veeam will delete all 365 restore points after it has created 14 days of new restore points with the new settings.

If he had a Forward Incremental Chain with monthly full backups, you could moving some of the vbks out of the folder to another location, before changing to the new retention settings. This would protect the vbks from the deletion process.

You can also export a backup from any restore point into a standalone vbk file.

[eduzimrs]

Hi Mildur,

Thanks for the reply, the EXPORT feature will do the trick, thank you.

[Mildur]

Your welcome, eduardo.