Backing Up Your Data With Azure, the Basics

Backup is one of those things everyone agrees is important and almost nobody sets up properly until after they've lost something. Here's the basic shape of how backup works in Azure, without getting lost in every option available.

Azure Backup is the core service

Azure Backup is Microsoft's built in backup service, and it can protect several different things: virtual machines, certain databases, individual files and folders on a server, and more. You define what's called a backup policy, which sets how often backups happen and how long they're kept, and Azure handles the scheduled copying for you in the background.

The nice part is that backups get stored in a separate, resilient storage layer that Microsoft manages, so a problem with your original virtual machine or server doesn't also take out your backup copies. That separation is the whole point. A backup sitting on the same machine as the thing it's backing up isn't really a backup.

Retention is a decision, not a default

How long you keep backups matters more than people think. Keep them too short, and you might not notice a problem, like slowly corrupted data, until it's already outside your backup window and gone from every copy you have. Keep everything forever and your storage costs climb for no real benefit. A common approach is layered retention: daily backups kept for a couple of weeks, weekly backups kept for a couple of months, and monthly backups kept for a year or more. Azure Backup supports this kind of tiered policy directly.

Backup is not the same as disaster recovery

This distinction trips people up. Backup protects you from data loss: accidental deletion, corruption, a bad update gone wrong. Disaster recovery is about keeping your systems running, or getting them running again fast, if an entire region or data center has a serious problem. Azure Site Recovery handles that second scenario, replicating whole systems to another region so you can fail over if needed. Most small and mid sized organizations need solid backup a lot more urgently than they need full disaster recovery, so if you're prioritizing, start there.

The test people skip

Having backups configured means nothing if you've never actually tried restoring from one. I'd rather find out a restore doesn't work the way I expected during a calm afternoon test than during an actual emergency. Pick something low stakes, restore it, and confirm it comes back the way you expected. It takes half an hour and it's the difference between a backup that works on paper and one you can actually trust.