Is it possible to setup backup retention as "Permanent" ? If yes, how to ?

You would need to look in to setting up GFS for your backups which you can find information here - https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_copy_gfs.html

Hi @nattakit, do all backups need permanent retention or just key backups?

Veeam doesn’t support not having a retention policy but you can set the retention periods to excessively long times in the form of many years. 

The secondary consideration for this is immutable backups. If you need to retain these backups forever, that also implies that they must be protected from data modification/corruption. You can create immutable backups to a Veeam Hardened Repository, or to an object storage provider, or to a WORM tape. But the first two options have an expiration period of immutability as they are storage systems that support overwriting blocks on disks. WORM tapes will exist in a separate tape pool as they can’t have a retention period due to their very nature (Write Once Read Many = WORM).

With that out the way, now onto the third consideration: Data Durability.

It’s all good and well saying that the data must be kept permanently, but that is a far longer period of time than the lifetime expectation of any currently available enterprise storage. So you’ll need to ensure multiple copies and transferring the data between any storage systems as you inevitably replace these, then you’ll want to use SureBackup to validate these backups to ensure that you don’t get any data rot over time and so the data is all clean and recoverable.

Even with WORM tape this is still a problem. LTO tape drives previously supported reading tapes from its (the tape drive’s) generation and up to 2 versions behind, but with LTO 8 and 9 this appears to now be its generation and 1 version behind. So consider you write a tape on LTO-8 or 9, and you move on to LTO-15 in the future, how will you read that LTO-8/9 tape? You’ll need to migrate that data or hope your old LTO-8/9 drive is still functional (and hope is not a great DR strategy 😆).

So in summary, the retention period itself isn’t as much a problem as ensure durable data and immutable data.

It’s the only key backup for permanent retention required.

Thank you for sharing information and suggestions.

In which case id suggest using WORM tapes stored in a secure, climate controlled facility and have a lifecycle process to copy older data to new generation LTO drives whenever your organisation makes a transition. Multiple copies in multiple locations would be a strong compliment to this. You could use GFS to make your “key” backups and then also keep a copy on readily accessible storage via methods such as immutability on durable object storage

Yes, backup storage is storeonce array that is connected to the proxy and gateway servers.

The backup store is Catalyst store.

Customer wants to backup full every hour with "permanent" retention. Uncertain about setting up GFS due to lack of weekly and monthly options.

Hi @nattakit -

As shared already above, there is no “permanent” setting within Veeam. The longest you can configure Short-Term Retention on your backups is for “9999” days or retention points. The closest you can do to “permanent” is select the Short-Term Retention Policy in the Storage section of the job wizard to “Days” (not “restore points”), then backup every hour. Then configure the number to be “9999”. If you divide 9999 by 365 (days in a yr), you get 27 years worth of restore point data (multiplied by 24 because your customer is wanting to backup every hr it seems?).

Hope that helps.

For permanent backup retention, I will export a backup to another backup file so that there is no retention policy applied.  I use this for “final” backups of a VM when it is being decommissioned.  In your case, this can be troublesome for a few reason in your case.

1. There’s nothing really stopping the data from manually being deleted, thusly Michael’s suggestion of WORM media.
2. Seems that you want to do this quite often, meaning you’d probably want to automate this process.  I only really see PowerShell scripts working for this, but that still feels pretty hacked together.

Really, the only options I see are going to be WORM or immutable storage, some sort of automation/scripting to copy the backup data somewhere, or adjusting the customers expectation of retaining hourly full backups forever.  This sounds like a bit of a nightmare on it’s own depending on what and how much data there is here.

I don’t understand why the Veeam configuration has a maximum retention of 730 days. How can I increase it?

Veeam has to keep track of the backup metadata and database configuration information for the retention period, but I’d suggest raising a support case with Veeam to get their stance on what the maximum retention per setting is and any guidance they can provide.

@nattakit - you seem to be on an older version of Veeam. I believe with v12 they increased the retention to 9999. I'm on v12.1 & have 9999 as my limit. 

About 27 years ! That´s a long time.

I am pretty sure that Veeam's version 12 is correct as below capture screen.

Because I have limited access, I will try again. For more information, it's a Linux agent backup job, not a VM job. They may have different maximum days ?

Hi @nattakit -

I was just following up on your post here. Did you still have questions? If you do still have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. Or, did any of the provided comments help you out? If any of the provided comments did help, we ask you mark one as ‘Best Answer’ so other community members with a similar question who come across your post may benefit.

Thank you.