Small details – big impact!
With Veeam Version 10 two new options were added to the backup job settings.
The first one is addressing the retention policy.
Retention policy
It was always possible to define the number of restore points to keep.
So if you performed one backup run per day and configured the setting to eg. 14, one might think that you can reach back for two weeks.
This was true as long as no extra backup runs were triggered manually. Because each extra run took away one day…
With Version 10 you can simply configure a “number of days” instead of a “number of restore points”.
So no more fear that you cannot reach back as long as expected. And no more need to calculate the correct settings (whats the correct setting when I perform four backups a day and want to keep them for 90 days 🙂
GFS Retention Policy within the backup job
If you ask yourself, what the heck is a GFS retention policy? GFS means “Grandfather-Father-Son”.
It’s the possiblity to store backup files for long periods of time – weekly, monthly and even yearly backups.
Before Version 10, only a “backup copy job” was able to process a GFS retention policy.
Now the backup job itself offers this possiblity, too:
You can activate it with the tick-box and configure the number of weekly, monthly and yearly backups using the “Configure…” button.
Please note, that Veeam takes care to save storage IO and space when building these full backup files for long-term retention:
No new backup files are created for this purpose. It uses backup files already created and marks them with a GFS flag.
What does this mean? If you use for example an incremental forever backup chain, one full backup file (.vbk) and a given number of incremental files (.vib) will be created:
If you configured GFS to perform an eg. weekly Full Backup at the last Sunday, you will only find an incremental file (.vib) file as shown above. But Veeam will flag the Sunday .vib file with the GFS flag:
As time flies by, every day a new incremental file will be created. And the oldest .vib file will be merged into the first full file (.vbk) to only keep the configured number of restore points.
After six days, our GFS flaged .vib file will be merged into the full file. And so here it is – our weekly full backup file as configured. But no need for IO operations to create an extra full backup file for GFS.
The second place where Veeam tries to save space is if you configure weekly and monthly GFS full backups. The software takes care to use one of the weekly fulls as a monthly full, too.
Two small details – but a big impact for the backup job configuration usability!