I think, Veeam will guarantee you, that the offloaded vbk in the archive tier is compatible with newer versions of the product.

But Veeam do not guarantee that a block/object is readable. Therefore, you need to test your backups, that they are restorable. On storage, corruption can always happen. Not only on premise, but in the cloud on Amazon or Azure too.

AGuarantee, that a stored data is readable should come from the storage vendor. But even them do not guarantee that.

Test - Test - Test your restore possibility.

Thats correct with testing. I need a document from veeam. So I opend a ticket.

So I will contact amazon to get some documents. 

Who else is useing veeam for archiving in the financal sector? What is your archiving strategie?

Thank you. 

Amazon garantees on the webpage a durability of 99.999999999% for Glacier Products.

Cloud Data Archiving | Long-term Object Storage | Amazon S3 Glacier

Looks very good for long time archival. :)

We call it in germany “audit-proof archiving”. Thats what we need. “Revisionssicherheit – Wikipedia”

I am sure to provide it with veeam, but I need to convince my management. That´s why I am asking. 

As Veeam only provide software, not hardware it’s down to your policies configured within Veeam and the supported durability of underlying storage. There’s no reason to say it couldn’t, I’d suggest looking at the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule for this specific requirement. Likely using a copy to Tape and a copy to object

That’s correct, that’s the way we do it. (3-2-1 …). That’s fine. We just need to confirm, that the .vbk will be readable in 10-30 years. For example .pdf is a vaild way to archive data. That’s our business requirement.

The rest, I totally agree. We do veryfication, archive tier immutable offloading, and archive testing. I am thinking about, putting veeam installation files in the backup and archive jobs. Or even the backup server. 

I'm not sure if a backup can count as ‘revisionssicher’ from a legal perspective; this is something a lawyer would need to confirm. But one requirement would be that the data cannot be altered which you can achieve with S3 immutability or the hardened Linux repository; the later in even is certified for this purpose: https://www.veeam.com/blog/hardened-repository-passes-compliance.html

If you go this way and avoid implementing a real archiving solution then I would suggest, as @MicoolPaul says, that you follow the 3-2-1 rule with an additional archive copy; so more a 3-2-2. I wouldn't rely just on a single storage solution for all archives. Testing will only show you that your storage/backup has failed but it won't repair lost backup data/blocks.

And the last one; will you be able to restore a Veeam Backup which is over 10 years old? Well I haven't heard of any incompatibilities and Veeam also advertises their mobility and independence of the backup files. Does anyone have a copy of Veeam v1 for testing?

to add my two cents: maybe Veeam guaranties to be able to read vbk-files for a very long time, they can't guarantee you that they will still be alive 30 years from now. So at some date in the future you could get to the point, you will have to “archive” your backup solution or migrate data. Either because the vendor does not exists any more, and/or your decide to switch to another vendor. In my opinion, when you stay with your vendor, you will have good support for long-time retention. But it is totally different when you switch vendor. I see a lot of customers changing their backup solution. Some of them keep old solution in place, in case something needs to be restored. Others do or try to migrate backup data to the new software.

Also @Hartmut  - I have a 10 year old Veeam backup I can send you to give you an example of retrieving the archive, private message me or email me if you would like me to send it to you.