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Historical archive of deleted VM's.

Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

I was wondering if anyone else does this.

When we delete a VM, I often have someone come ask me where it was 6 months to a year later and sometimes there is something unnoticed that is broken. 

Due to the amount of storage we use here (PB’s) I tend to not want to keep all these old VM’s powered off, or even on the Veeam SANs as they take up a ton of space for something that most likely isn’t needed.

 

To resolve this I created a media pool on both tape libraries that has a retention of 2 years. When I power the VM off for the final time I do a Veeam zip, then add it to a file to tape job at both sites.

In the file to tape job I just grab the VBK from the repo and then can remove the Veeam ZIP when it’s done.  Even though it’s not 3-2-1 technically the VM’s are requested to be deleted anyways. If I lost them it wouldn’t be critical. Having them on tape is cheap, and people are very happy when they can get their data.

 

 

 

 

 

 

30 comments

Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

With our 50-100 year retention policies for some stuff it gets pretty insane to keep this stuff on our SANS.

 

Catching up on some old posts/tabs I forgot about, but I have to ask...what kind of data requires a 50-100 year retention policy?  The only thing I can think of is government records, like property records and such….

 

I work for government, and lots to do with things such as policing, homicides etc. 

Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

If you charge for the service, why not good for you, but it is abnormal if the business application uses the backup as an archive. There is a small problem of application architecture.

So the IT department and team that does the backups, file servers, storage, servers shouldn’t be in charge of the data archives and retention? Even though we use the backup software of Veeam, TSM and cloud storage, and no one else even has credentials to do so?

We are not an MSP, this is our data. The law is that we have to keep it. we are paying for this, not charging. 

 

It’s quite normal in our circumstances to have crazy retention. 

 

I just want it off prod as easy as possible and into Wasabi and tape as the chances of needed to restore it get smaller every year. It still doesn’t change it’s mandated by law. 

 

 

 

OK, my experience is, if you charge internally for the storage consumption, then are suddenly many hard requirement not so hard anymore… 😎

And yes, I agree, some legal requirements make no really sense. perhaps you have the date after all these years, but do you have machines and software to read them and work with them?

Funny you asked this. I said the same thing today. In 40 years will Veeam version 30 be able to read Windows server 2016? who knows. Will that file type of that video still work? 

 

Heck it’s not been too long since VHS and it’s hard to find a VHS player these days, or a Betamax. 

 

However, Those are things I ask to prove a point, but at the end of the day I am told to keep and archive the data for legal reasons. It doesn’t state I have to be able to access the files. Most likely the IT department will be tasked with that too, but in reality, I'll be retired in 20 years and this data will be stale. there is a large chance most of it is garbage, but not my place to say. 

 

No one said all laws made sense, or were even productive.  I have been pushing for retention policies though and getting a BIT of traction. The price tags on PB’s of disk, cloud, archive, backup, etc have helped.

 

 

JMeixner
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Unfortunately you are right that not all regulations make sense.

And even more unfortunately it is expected in Germany that these data is readable in 30 years. I am very sceptical about this….

Jochen (Joe) Meixner | Veeam Vanguard 2024 | Veeam Legend 2021 - 2023 | Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) 2022 | Twitter: @JoMeix | BlueSky: @jmeixner.bsky.social
BertrandFR
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

It is an interesting debate that we have, we can see differents opinions/use case and regulations of each country. At the European level, retention is more regulated since the emergence of GDPR. There may be subtleties for the justice and police part for example, the majority of use case could be done in DB by business apps. I insist on it but it was a nice battle with the projects to convince them that the backup should not be in adhesion for this archiving, specially when they don’t pay for the backup service.

Example for logs collecting and sequestration, i prefer to handle this by a distinct part. Example you can push you data directly to an object storage with tiering and ensure legal hold by the bucket configuration...

If necessary it seems to me to have a wise discussion with the DPO, without forgetting that one moment it will be necessary to evoke the technical aspect and especially financial constraints.

Scott
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

The growth is exponential too. Just think how much video is created from peoples NVR systems, Wyze cameras etc. When crimes happen, those all have to get added to the case and kept for a long long time. Now we have 4k, 8k video.   what's next, 16k? 32k? holograms? haha It will happen.

 

Storage requirements get larger and more expensive. Cloud companies are laughing these days and are all for it to.

 

At the end of the day, I am a hands on specialist and can only give so much advice/direction which I have many times. I will do as I am told so my employer will continue to employee me. 

 

It’s a good thing I have a lot of tape storage. but every few years switching LTO generations means migrating it, Restores can get tedious. but at this rate, cloud and object storage for something that is going to be that old are not worth it. 

 

 

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