Veeam Backup & Replication 13.1 went GA on July 29 with a long list of changes, but the one most worth your attention if you're planning long-term backup retention is Vault Archive: a new managed archive tier that gives you a real alternative to hand-building an AWS S3 Glacier setup inside Veeam.
What Vault Archive actually is
Vault Archive extends Veeam's existing Vault cloud storage rather than replacing it. Recent, recovery-critical backups stay on Vault's performance-optimized tier, and aged backups tier automatically into Vault Archive, all under one platform and one predictable price. It's immutable, air-gapped, and encrypted with AES-256, you can choose which region your archived data lives in for compliance purposes, and archived NAS and cloud workloads get scanned for malware as part of the same process. It's also built specifically to ingest large, unstructured NAS backups directly, which is exactly the kind of data that tends to pile up and get expensive to keep on primary storage.
Why this beats hand-rolling an S3 Glacier archive tier
Pointing your Archive Tier at S3 Glacier instead means you're now running two vendor relationships instead of one. You have to stand up your own S3 bucket, enable versioning and Object Lock if you want immutability, manage IAM permissions, and pick a Glacier storage class, each with its own trade-offs:
Glacier Instant Retrieval restores in milliseconds but carries a 90-day minimum storage duration. Glacier Flexible Retrieval takes minutes to hours depending on whether batch operations are enabled, also with a 90-day minimum. Glacier Deep Archive is the cheapest per gigabyte but retrieval can take up to 12 hours, and the minimum storage duration jumps to 180 days. Delete or move data before that minimum window is up and AWS charges you an early deletion fee on top of whatever you're already paying Veeam for the backup software.
Vault Archive collapses all of that into a single Veeam-native tier. One bill, one console, one support relationship, and no separate cloud account for us to secure, audit, and keep credentials rotated on. It also means your archive tier is scanned and protected as part of the same chain as the rest of your backups, rather than being a plain object storage bucket that has no concept of malware scanning on its own.
What's new for everyone, Glacier included
Two other Archive Tier changes in 13.1 apply no matter which backend you use:
Archive Tier Copy Policy lets qualifying GFS restore points copy to archive as soon as they're created, instead of waiting for the local performance-tier copy to age out first. A configurable minimum immutability period lets you set a fixed immutability window rather than locking data for the entire retention period, which helps control archive-side costs. Both work with Vault Archive, Azure Archive, and S3 Glacier, but only in a direct Performance Tier to Archive Tier setup, not if you're running a Capacity Tier in between.
Should you switch?
If you're currently maintaining your own Glacier bucket for long-term retention, or you've been putting off setting one up because the storage-class and minimum-duration math is a headache, Vault Archive is worth a serious look. It's less of a fit if you've already got a mature AWS environment with lifecycle policies you're happy with, or a compliance requirement that specifies a particular cloud provider.
If you want help figuring out which option actually fits your retention requirements and budget, reach out. We're happy to run the numbers on both.
Want this reviewed against your environment?
We'll walk your stack with you and tell you plainly what we'd change first.