This is an archive version of the document. To get the most up-to-date information, see the current version.

Backup Archiving

You can archive backups created with the daily, weekly or monthly schedule for longer periods of time:

Cloud-native snapshots and snapshot replicas can be archived for weeks and months.
Image-level backups can be archived for weeks, months and years.

To archive backups, in backup policy settings, you must specify several schedule types: one schedule type for regular backup creation and one or more schedule types for backup archiving.

In terms of backup archiving, Veeam Backup for AWS treats schedule types as tiers. Tiers have the following priority (low to high): daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. When you specify several schedule types, Veeam Backup for AWS creates restore points by the lowest tire schedule, and then archives one of the created restore points by higher tier schedules.

For example, you may want to have multiple restore points created for your critical workloads throughout the day, and keep one of those restore points in the chain for some weeks. In this case, you must enable two schedule types in backup policy settings: daily and weekly.

In daily schedule settings, you define hours and days when restore points must be created.

Veeam Backup for AWS propagates these settings to the schedule of a higher tier, which is the weekly schedule.

In weekly schedule settings, you select which one of the restore points created by the daily schedule must be archived.

In retention policy settings for the weekly schedule, you specify for how long you want to archive the selected restore point. For example, if you protect EC2 instances with cloud-native snapshots, and in retention policy settings you specify 2, Veeam Backup for AWS will archive the selected restore point for 2 weeks.