Backup for Azure Managed Disk is now generally available

Azure Backup is a simple, secure, and cost-effective cloud based backup solution that now enables you to configure protection for Azure Managed Disk in a few simple steps. Azure Backup offers a turnkey solution that provides snapshot lifecycle management for managed disk by automating periodic creation of snapshots and retain them for a configured duration using Backup policy. You can easily manage the disk snapshots with zero infrastructure cost and without need for custom scripting or any management overhead. This is a crash-consistent backup solution that takes point in time backup of a managed disk using incremental snapshots with support for multiple backups per day. Moreover, it is an agent-less solution and does not impact production application performance. It supports backup and restore of both OS and Data disk (including Shared disk), regardless of whether or not they are currently attached to a running Azure Virtual machine.

Key Benefits of Azure Disk Backup:

• More frequent & quick backups without interrupting the virtual machine.
• Does not affect the performance of the production application.
• No security concerns as it does not require running custom scripts or installing agents.
• Cost-effective solution to backup specific disk.

Azure Disk Backup solution is useful in following use-cases:

• Need for frequent backups per day without application being quiescent.
• Apps running on cluster scenario - both Windows and Linux clusters that are writing to Shared Disk.
• Specific need for agent-less backup due to security or performance concerns on the application.
• Application consistent backup of VM is not feasible as Line of Business apps does not support Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

To learn more about Azure Disk Backup, read the documentation.

For information on region availability, supported scenarios and limitations, refer the support matrix.