Selective disks backup for Azure Virtual Machine is in public preview
Published date: August 06, 2020
The Azure Backup service provides simple, secure, and cost-effective solution to back up your Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Currently, Azure Backup supports backing up all disks (OS and Data disks) in a VM using backup solution for Azure VMs. Today, we are announcing the public preview of selective disks backup and restore capability for Azure Virtual Machines. Using the selective disks backup functionality, you get an option to backup a subset of the data disks in a VM. This provides an efficient and cost-effective solution for your backup and restore needs. Each recovery point contains only the disks that are included in the backup operation which further allows you to have a subset of disks restored from the given recovery point during the restore operation. This applies to both restore from snapshot and vault.
Benefits include –
- Cost optimization: Low cost of backup storage gives you control over which disks to include or exclude
- Quicker backup and restore operation: Given that the recovery point includes only selective disks, the amount of data that is transferred during backup to the vault and restored back from the vault is significantly reduced thus optimizing network bandwidth
This solution is useful particularly in following scenarios -
- Users who have critical data to be backed up in only one or a subset of disks and do not want backup for rest of the disks attached to a VM minimizes the backup storage costs
- Users utilizing:
- Other backup solutions for part of their VM
- Data in the same manner that they backup their databases
- Data that uses a different workload backup solution, and then using an Azure VM level backup for the rest of the data
- Disks to build an efficient and a robust system utilizing the best capabilities available