Retention per VM via GUI

[tjk]

I swore at one point in my testing of PBS, I saw an option that said to configure retention period via the datastore in PBS, but now I cannot find that.

So, with PBS and PVE, can I have a different retention period per VM? For example test/dev VM's have a 14 day retention, PROD VM's have 30 days, monthly, 5 year, etc?

If not this would be a great feature to add into the GUI.

 

[dcsapak]

So, with PBS and PVE, can I have a different retention period per VM?

no not directly.

what you *could* do is to add the pbs storage multiple times to pve with different retention settings and backup the vms to the respective storage

EDIT: what i said is not really recommended, see the answer of my colleague below for a better solution

 

[t.lamprecht]

So, with PBS and PVE, can I have a different retention period per VM? For example test/dev VM's have a 14 day retention, PROD VM's have 30 days, monthly, 5 year, etc?

You can set retention policy per PVE Backup job, so you can just create a separate job per retention policy use case and select only the relevant VMs there. Using pools that can made even more nicely.

You'll be able to configure those per-job settings over GUI in pve-manager version 7.0-12:

 

[tjk]

You can set retention policy per PVE Backup job, so you can just create a separate job per retention policy use case and select only the relevant VMs there. Using pools that can made even more nicely.

I don't see the ability to edit retention per job, I am using PVE 7.0.11 and PBS 2.0.9. Is this in 7.0.12 only or should I have this ability now?

Also, what do you mean by pools, where is this documented?

 

[t.lamprecht]

I don't see the ability to edit retention per job, I am using PVE 7.0.11 and PBS 2.0.9. Is this in 7.0.12 only or should I have this ability now?

Yeah, as said it's available with pve-manager version 7.0-12, that version is not yet available on enterprise (but should be soon).

Also, what do you mean by pools, where is this documented?

With pools I mean resource pools: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#pveum_resource_pools
Those can be used as backup selection for backup jobs with the "pool based" selection mode.

 

[tjk]

Yeah, as said it's available with pve-manager version 7.0-12, that version is not yet available on enterprise (but should be soon).

This is awesome, thank you and I look forward to this functionality!

 

[fiona]

Hi,
please note that PBS will still apply its own prune options/schedule. After all, it doesn't know about the client settings. So to make it work, the prune settings of the datastore in PBS will need to be more lax than any of the job-specific options (or turned off completely).