Azure's backup service, which keeps recovery points, long-term retention included, in a Recovery Services vault. It restores data rather than failing workloads over, which is the job of Site Recovery.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
AZ-305AZ-104AZ-700SC-500AZ-802ALZ
Each book explains Azure Backup in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Long-term retention
Azure SQL feature for holding on to full backups well beyond the normal window: weekly, monthly or yearly copies can be retained for a decade.
- Recovery Services vault
Where Azure Backup and Site Recovery keep their data; it offers soft delete, immutability and multi-user authorisation, but is the wrong choice for cheaply archiving files you already have.
- OVER
Gives a T-SQL window function its window: PARTITION BY, ORDER BY and, if wanted, a ROWS or RANGE frame. Rankings and running totals can then be worked out while every row is kept.
- Job
A sequence of steps executed together on one agent or runner, or on the server for agentless work. While running, each occupies one of your parallel jobs.
- Azure Site Recovery
Disaster recovery service replicating VMs to a secondary site or region; recovery time is measured in minutes and recovery points are kept for no longer than 15 days.
Related terms
- Azure Backup reports
Reporting for Azure Backup, fed by diagnostic settings on each vault. Log Analytics workspaces receiving the data may be in any region, whereas a storage account target has to share the vault's region.
- Azure Disk Backup
Azure Backup protection for managed disks that needs no agent, taking snapshots kept in the same region; recovery isn't orchestrated automatically.
- Azure Files backup
Azure Backup for file shares, using a Recovery Services vault that must share the storage account's region. Schedules are either daily or hourly; hourly ones repeat every 4, 6, 8 or 12 hours, with 1 and 2 added in newer policies.
- Azure VM backup policy
Policy defining when Azure Backup protects a VM (once a day or once a week, or several times a day under the Enhanced policy) and how long recovery points are retained at daily, weekly, monthly and yearly levels.
- AzureBackupReport
Diagnostics category on a vault, now legacy, that fed Backup reports and worked only with Azure diagnostics mode. Its replacement is the set of resource-specific Core Azure Backup Data events.
- Backup center
Single pane in Azure Backup for managing all your vaults and backup policies together.
- Backup Management Service
Service application of Azure Backup; to back up VMs encrypted with Azure Disk Encryption, it needs access to the vault's keys and secrets, granted by an access policy or a Key Vault role.
- Backup policy
Setting in an Azure Backup vault fixing when one type of workload is backed up and for how long. Policies don't extend beyond their vault, so VM and Azure Files policies must be created in each vault separately.