Domain 5 of 5 · Chapter 2 of 2

Backup and Recovery

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Included in this chapter:

  • Backup vs Site Recovery, and the two vault types
  • Backup policy, instant restore, and restore options
  • Cross-region restore and Site Recovery failover
  • Reports and alerts: monitoring backups at scale
  • Exam-pattern recognition

Azure Backup vs Azure Site Recovery vs the two vault types

DimensionAzure BackupAzure Site Recovery (ASR)
GoalRecover data (point-in-time copies)Keep app running (business continuity / DR)
MechanismScheduled recovery points into a vaultContinuous disk replication to a second region
Typical RPOHours to a day (15 min for SQL/SAP HANA in VM)Seconds (continuous for Azure VMs)
Recovery actionRestore a VM, disk, file, or databaseFailover to the secondary region, then failback
Protects againstDeletion, corruption, ransomwareDatacenter / region outage
Vault usedRecovery Services vault (classic) or Backup vault (newer)Recovery Services vault

Decision tree

Recover data, or keep apponline through an outage?Keep app onlineRecover dataAzure Site Recoveryreplicate region to regionAzure Backup: classic workloador newer datasource?DR drillRun a test failoverVM, Files, SQL-in-VMBlob, Disk, PostgreSQLRecovery Services vault(also holds ASR)Backup vaultRestore in primary region,or paired secondary region?PrimarySecondaryInstant restore from snapshotCross-region restore (GRS + CRR)
Cheat sheet

Cheat sheet

  • Azure Backup recovers data; Site Recovery keeps the app running
  • Classic workloads use a Recovery Services vault; newer datasources use a Backup vault
  • Back up on-premises files and folders with the MARS agent into a Recovery Services vault
  • A backup policy is a schedule plus retention; Azure VM retention follows GFS
  • Use the Enhanced policy for multiple backups a day; Standard backs up once daily
  • SQL Server and SAP HANA in an Azure VM reach a 15-minute RPO via log backups
  • Application-consistent is the default VM snapshot, with file-system and crash-consistent as fallbacks
  • Instant restore serves the local snapshot, kept 1–5 days (Standard) or 1–30 days (Enhanced)
  • Cross-region restore needs a GRS vault with cross-region restore enabled
  • Cross-region restore is vault-tier only: snapshots aren't replicated, so no Replace-existing
  • Restore options: Create new VM, Restore disks, Replace existing, or recover individual files
  • Azure VM region-to-region replication is the core AZ-104 Site Recovery scenario
  • Run a test failover to rehearse DR without touching production
  • RPO is data loss, RTO is recovery time: ASR targets seconds of RPO for Azure VMs
  • Use Backup center (now Azure Business Continuity Center) to manage backups across many vaults
  • Backup reports need diagnostic settings sending vault data to a Log Analytics workspace
  • Get real-time backup-failure notification with an Azure Monitor alert routed to an action group
  • Azure Files backup protects SMB shares only and needs a vault in the same region
  • Azure Files snapshot backups allow up to 6 per day and 200 snapshots per share
  • Snapshot Azure Files backups support item-level restore; vault-standard does full-share restore only
  • On-demand backups keep their own retention; deleted backup data is soft-deleted for 14 days
  • After an ASR failover: commit it (deleting all recovery points), then reprotect to replicate back
  • Blob soft delete retains deleted blobs 1–365 days; Undelete Blob restores them when versioning is off
  • Blob versioning creates a new version on every write; restore by promoting a previous version with Copy Blob
  • Azure SQL long-term retention uses W/M/Y plus WeekOfYear and applies only to future backups
  • Azure SQL point-in-time restore retention tops out at 35 days (Basic only 7) and restores to a new database

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References

  1. What is Azure Backup?
  2. About Azure Site Recovery
  3. Overview of Recovery Services vaults
  4. Overview of the Backup vaults
  5. About Azure VM backup
  6. Back up Azure VMs with the Enhanced policy
  7. Back up SQL Server databases on Azure VMs
  8. About SAP HANA database backup on Azure VMs
  9. Azure Instant Restore capability
  10. Restore VMs by using the Azure portal (incl. Cross Region Restore)
  11. Overview of Backup center
  12. Azure Business Continuity Center overview
  13. Configure Azure Backup reports
  14. Azure Monitor alerts overview