Permenent retention, why not?

You could also use Immutable repos as well which would keep backups longer as well with the retention settings.

Hi ​@Hepkat -

Yeah...Veeam doesn’t have any “permanent” retention period setting for anything. As Chris shared, the closest Veeam allows “long periods” is with GFS.

I wrote about the increase in retention Veeam added with the release of v12.0 at the below article:

Basically though, since initial release of v12, Veeam now allows 9999 weeks, 999 months, and 999 years of restore points with BACKUP GFS settings. With other Jobs (like Agent), I’m not sure that applies; so if you need to continue to use Veea Agents for your customer Backups, not sure there’s an answer. To verify, I’d check with Veeam Support.

Of course, with the increase of size of restore points, monitoring storage space is of utmost importance.

Best.

Hi ​@Hepkat , You can also export your backup using the export feature, look at the screen below.

You can configure to delete automaticaly for 7 years, ou leave it forever.

hope this helps.

Thank you guys for the above suggestions. Although not perfect, and also not exactly the solution we're looking for, it seems that tinkering around with GFS policy is the closest Veeam comes to providing permanent retention.

Maybe a suggestion for the Veeam development team, it would be really great to have to a SIMPLE and CONVENIENT option for permanent retention of Windows Agent backups. There's a 9999 day/restore point option (27 years) provided for VMWare backups, what's so programmatically difficult about providing the same option for Windows Agent backups?

It's all a matter of SIMPLICITY. In high pressure, high stress environments, IT admins simply don't have the time to spend hours learning about and configuring GFS policies, when all they need is a simple option to enable permanent retention. Veeam is a huge improvement over Veritas Backup Exec, the previous solution we'd been using for several years, but when it comes to simplicity, I think Veritas had a superior understanding of what IT admins actually want.

Again, thanks for your suggestions!

Regards, Kurt

No problem Kurt. You can always go over to the Forums & make a feature request. 

Best. 

​@Hepkat You are right, I used to teach HPE Data Protector courses  (opentext now), we can configure permanent retention on it as well, when I have some students from HPE DP, they ask how to set permanet retention .

Please excuse my direct question: What would be the point of a retention period of 10 years (or longer) while maintaining daily restore points? Do you really need such granularity over such a long period of time?

In my opinion and experience, GFS storage, with its ability to have lower granularity (e.g., monthly or yearly) in the long term (possibly even with offloading to cheaper storage) while maintaining higher granularity (daily) in the short term, meets 99.9% of storage and recovery requirements. And it prevents excessive and wasteful use of backup storage.

It has nothing to do with what I need, but what my client wants.

amazing discussion, guys, really helpful