Azure Backup & Disaster Recovery

Data protection and business continuity

Azure Backup

Native backup service for Azure VMs, SQL databases, files, and on-premises workloads.

Supported Workloads

* Azure Virtual Machines (Windows/Linux)
* Azure SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance
* Azure Files and Blob storage
* SAP HANA databases
* On-premises servers via MARS agent or MABS

Backup Policy Settings

Setting	Options
Frequency	Hourly, Daily, Weekly
Daily Retention	7-9999 days
Weekly Retention	1-5163 weeks
Instant Restore	1-5 days (snapshots)

Azure Site Recovery

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) for replicating VMs to a secondary region.

Replication Scenarios

* Azure to Azure: Replicate between Azure regions
* VMware to Azure: Migrate or DR for VMware VMs
* Hyper-V to Azure: On-premises Hyper-V replication
* Physical to Azure: Bare-metal server protection

Key Concepts

* RPO: Recovery Point Objective - max acceptable data loss
* RTO: Recovery Time Objective - max acceptable downtime
* Recovery Plans: Orchestrated failover sequences
* Test Failover: Validate DR without impacting production

Best Practices

* Test regularly: Perform DR drills quarterly at minimum
* Document runbooks: Step-by-step failover procedures
* Monitor replication health: Set alerts for sync issues
* Use paired regions: Use Azure's region pairs for compliance
* Automate: Use Recovery Plans with scripts and runbooks
* Secure backups: Enable soft delete and immutable vaults

Related: See the Disaster Recovery Testing guide for DR test procedures.