My daily backup policy for VM's keeps backups for 30 days.
Now I want to save a specific backup and keep it for a longer time. As a baseline for work.
Is this possible with Azure? How can I configure this?
I am assuming you need to backup the VM on demand. One of the ways this can be done is from the Azure Portal.
Navigate to the VM which needs to be backed up. Under Operations section , select Backup menu.
Click Back up now.
It gives an option to specify a date till which you want(a custom retention period) to preserve your backup copy.
Related
Due to the requirements of ISO accreditation we need to setup notification logic when long term retention backup was taken in Azure SQL Server ( not SQL Server on Azure VM).
Does anyone have any ideas about how to accomplish this goal?
P.S we don’t want to move our DB to Azure VM, so we can’t use Backup Alert service or something like this that is related to SQL Server Azure VM deployment way.
There is no out-of-the-box method to achieve this. Shortest you can concentrate on is a week see.
Below are few points to consider.
You cannot control the LTR backup time, you can define a policy using a combination of four parameters: weekly backup retention (W), monthly backup retention (M), yearly backup retention (Y), and week of year (WeekOfYear) but not exact date and time.
Azure SQL database backups - responsibility to monitor and fix #11412
Possible workaround
Since LTR backups store full Database backups, this causes Metric Full backup storage size to update. You can monitor through custom charts and set alerts.
You can further leverage Azure Monitoring REST API
Snapshots cause a lot of cost. In some of my storage accounts I don't need them.
But I can't find a place where I can turn it off.
How can I disable snapshots completely from a storage account in Azure?
It's not a feature that can be turned off completely; Although to make snapshots you would have to explicitly write code to create them, unless you have soft delete enabled. In that case an overwrite will create a snapshot in deleted state but it'll be automatically removed once the soft delete time expires.
Another option would be the lifecycle management. There you can make a rule to automatically delete snapshots once they are more than X days old. That check runs daily so the storage costs are only extended by a few days.
Navigate to your storage account's blob and look for your snapshots under Snapshots. From there, you may manage them.
https://i.imgur.com/P2LRras.png
If you've already established a resource for it, go to that resource's page and delete it.
https://i.imgur.com/qLvFe3v.png
I have a VM and I want to be able to copy a large amount of files to a backup drive. I have remote desktop and tried to copy that way , but the copy halts and gives no error.
The size is about 120G of data ?
Copying files larger than 2 GB with RDP isn't supported. Check this article for details.
As an alternate option, you could try using the Azure Backup service if you intend to back up your Azure VM. Backups are stored in a Recovery Services vault with built-in management of recovery points. Configuration and scaling are simple, backups are optimized, and you can easily restore as needed.
As part of the backup process, a snapshot is taken, and the data is transferred to the Recovery Services vault with no impact on production workloads. You can also schedule your backups to a suitable time so that resources are optimally used.
I currently have a Backup job in progress in Azure...File and Folder level only. I need to stop the job it has been running for too long. How can I stop it.
In Azure Storage (Azure Files), you can go to Azure Files > Backup > select the ... > Stop Backup.
You can also stop a backup job through Powershell.
Stop-AzureRmBackupJob
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/azurerm.backup/stop-azurermbackupjob?view=azurermps-6.13.0
To stop backup on a VM, you can go to the vault item's dashboard and select one of the following:
Stop protection and retain backup data. This option will stop all future backup jobs from protecting your VM; however, Azure Backup service will retain the recovery points that have been backed up. You'll need to pay to keep the recovery points in the vault (see Azure Backup pricing for details). You'll be able to restore the VM if needed. If you decide to resume VM protection, then you can use Resume backup option.
Stop protection and delete backup data. This option will stop all future backup jobs from protecting your VM and delete all the recovery points. You won't be able to restore the VM nor use Resume backup option.
I've configured the retention policy in 'Manage Backups' for my Azure SQL Server but nothing is appearing under 'Available Backups'. Does there need to be an associated storage account? If so, how do I set it up?
From Azure's doc it is known that the automatic backups (full, differential and transaction log) are possible. And it is possible to configure retention period for these backups. The main question is where these backups are stored (from documentation by default within RA-GRS Standard blob storage)? and whether it is possible to change storage account and how to access to standard storage account with backups?
Thanks in advance.
Automatic backups are part of Azure SQL Database service and are managed by Azure. You cannot change where these backups are stored, that is managed by Azure. You cannot access those backups and copy them to another storage account, and you cannot manage them.
You can use PowerShell Get-AzureRmSqlDatabaseRestorePoints to get the earliest possible restore point for the database based on the automated backup service.
Get-AzureRmSqlDatabaseRestorePoints -ResourceGroupName "resname" `
-ServerName "yourservername" -DatabaseName "yourDBName"
With automatic backups, full database backups are created weekly, differential database backups are generally created every 12 hours, and transaction log backups are generally created every 5 - 10 minutes, with the frequency based on the performance level and amount of database activity. The first full backup is scheduled immediately after a database is created. It usually completes within 30 minutes, but it can take longer when the database is of a significant size.
If you want to have control over backups, you want to have greater retention period, then you can configure long term backups o export bacpacs of your database to an storage account as explained here.