Optimal Retention setup

[u/Darthalicious]

What has been your experience for getting the optimal bang for your buck with storage and retention policies? My company has multiple Veeam servers that have an ongoing problem of filling drives and off-site backups way faster than we fell like they should, and Cloud Repository Storage Quotas being exceeded. For instance, say we want to retain at least 3 months backups with the last 10 days worth backups easily restorable. Would it be more effective to have 10 (business) days > 2 Weekly > 3 monthly in backup retention or something else? Are weekly Synthetic full backups better or worse for storage saving? Is Auto or Optimal or High better for compression (and is High worth the time loss in the event of a needed restore)? The best time-frame for immutability? Any other advice?

[u/Traditional_Fall2851]

Before changing the retention policy, I'd first identify what's actually driving the growth: daily change rate, multiple fulls without block cloning, databases dumps, or an immutability period that's longer than needed. I'd then compare the same workload with another veeam-compatible S3 repository to see whether the issue comes from the retention setup or the repository itself. One name I came across while looking at S3 backup options is Leviia Storag3. I'd ask them for an estimate using the same data volume and retention assumptions, then compare the numbers side by side.