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NOW AVAILABLE

General availability: Azure Backup now supports Archive Tier for backups of SQL Server in Azure VMs

Published date: August 02, 2021

You can now retain your backups for a longer duration in a cost effective manner using Azure Backup’s archive tier for your Azure Virtual Machines and SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines. Alongside moving your long term retention(LTR) points to the low-cost archive tier, you can also perform restores from archive tier using a simplified integrated approach.

With this change, Backup Storage, the place where all your backup data in vaults go to, has 2 tiers – namely Vault-Standard and Vault-Archive. 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 of 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.

The feature is now generally available for SQL Server in 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. The support of vault-archive tier for Azure Virtual machine backups is also in limited preview and you can sign up for both limited public previews using the preview form. For detailed list of supported regions, follow the support Matrix.

Archive Tier for Azure Backup will not be chargeable for customers until September 1, 2021. All users can access the feature without added cost through August 2021. For pricing details, refer to our pricing page.

  • Azure Backup
  • Features
  • Management

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