Hi Marcel -

There’s no way I’m aware of..maybe someone can chime in. And maybe it would be better to have your question moved to the YARA and Script Library section?
https://community.veeam.com/yara-and-script-library-67

@Madi.Cristil ...what do you think?

At the very least, you could contact Support to see. Maybe ​@ddomask has a thought?

I’m not sure I understand your request correctly, because

1. If you need to prolong retention for existing chains, just edit the retention settings in the job or copy job - existing backups will follow the new retention setting.
2. If you need to prolong retention for selected restore points. use the export feature which lets you select target repository and retention. Another option would be to move the existing backups to a new job that has the desired retention setting.

But I guess you’re talking about a use case different from these two?

Can you maybe describe the situation a bit more? I think I’m misunderstanding because I’m not sure why we can’t just increase retention in the job settings if that’s the request.

If there are many workloads in a job and only specific workloads need their retention extended, I would use Backup Move and move such workloads to a dedicated job with the desired retention.

If just a copy of the data is needed to be kept for a separate time period, consider Copy Backup -- it allows for auto-deletion and you can customize the auto-delete options.

But I think I’m not understanding the request in full, as seems too simple to “just increase retention” So I suspect I’m missing something.

I am of the same with Matt. If you need to prolong retention then why not disable the job and create a new one even to keep the restore points. Exporting them is another option but you might even need to remove the job altogether which then sends the restore points to disconnected state but still there.

Clarity on the question will help.

Agree with the above about more info. Maybe I’m misreading something in the orig post, but why wouldn’t GFS work here?

scenario is:

i have backup job with tag, where are backed up 50 VMs

with 30 days daily and 12 weeks for weekly backup

customer created request to prolong specific weekly backup to 6 months retention

Then change the GFS retention to include 6 monthly backups as well.  That will address your concerns.

I guess you could create a PoSH script to copy the folders where the 12wk backups are stored, zip them up, then place them on some storage target as an isolated copy. Then of course your customer could add them to an isolated (Community Edition?) VBR if needed in the event of some kind of malicious incident recovery situation. 

Or, they could import them in their prod VBR to perform recovery operations in a non-malicious/standard recovery scenario. Thoughts?

i was thinking too complicated, (in another product is cmd like bpexpdate, so i was thinking, if something hidden here is not as well)

so, if customer found out, that he needed some restore point of some VM, which does not fit to retention period like 3 months, then only way is to export restore point and set retention like 1 year

but many thanks to all for many hints what are the options!

Yes, this will create the extra RP and keep it for 1 year.

If, instead, you want to have all future backups from this particular vm to be kept for longer as well, simply move this vm to another (new?) job which has been configured with the desired retention settings.

i was thinking too complicated, (in another product is cmd like bpexpdate, so i was thinking, if something hidden here is not as well)

so, if customer found out, that he needed some restore point of some VM, which does not fit to retention period like 3 months, then only way is to export restore point and set retention like 1 year

but many thanks to all for many hints what are the options!

Thanks for clarifying the need -- yes, this is the way to handle it currently with Veeam.

If you’re targeting Hardened Repositories, we have a cmdlet to set a custom immutability period on it:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/powershell/set-vbrimmutabilitylockexpirationdate.html?ver=120

This works per restore point, but I think it will work on individual ones as well. However, I don’t like this solution as you need to remember to check for the extended immutability -- IMO, Export or Copy backup are the best answer at the moment.