General availability: Azure Backup now supports vault-archive tier for Azure VMs
Published date: April 07, 2022
You can now retain your backups for a longer duration in a cost effective manner using Azure Backup’s vault-archive tier for your Azure Virtual Machines , SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines, and SAP HANA in Azure Virtual Machines. Move your long term retention (LTR) points to the low-cost vault-archive tier and perform restores from vault-archive tier using a simplified integrated approach.
When moving your backup data from vault-standard to vault-archive, Azure Backup converts your forever incremental data into full backups. This may result in increasing overall GB usage, but the costs will reduce because of the huge difference per GB between the two tiers. To simplify this balance, Azure Backup provides a set of recommended recovery points (RPs) that can be moved to vault-archive tier and achieve optimal savings.
Learn more about how recovery points are moved to the archive tier for Azure Virtual Machines.
You can also move all your recommendations for a particular Virtual Machines via Azure Portal in addition to sample scripts using Azure PowerShell. Learn More about how you can move your recovery points using Azure Portal.
The support for vault-archive tier is now generally available for Azure Virtual Machines in selected regions and will be slowly rolled out across other regions. However for the remaining regions, the feature will remain in limited public preview. For SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines and SAP HANA in Azure Virtual Machines, vault-archive is generally available in all the regions. For detailed list of supported regions, follow the support matrix.