We have written an application which writes media to and reads media from Azure Blob Storage.
I feel this may be a stupid question but is Azure Blob storage backed up?
Just wondering whether it is necessary to set this up explicitly?
Simple answer to your question is No. Azure Storage does not create back up of your data. This is something you would need to do.
#Pradeep mentions about data replication which is true but please do not confuse data replication with backup. Data replication is NOT data backup.
While it is true that a minimum of 3 copies of your blobs are maintained however if you delete the blob, all 3 copies are removed immediately.
Note: The data in your Microsoft Azure storage account is always replicated to ensure durability and high availability.
Replication copies your data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center, depending on which replication option you choose. Replication protects your data and preserves your application up-time in the event of transient hardware failures. If your data is replicated to a second data center, it's protected from a catastrophic failure in the primary location.
When you create a storage account, you can select one of the following replication options:
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
For more details, refer “Azure Storage replication”.
Related
We have Terraform state file stored in the Azure Storage Account. In case storage account went down we will be screwed. What is the best way to store the file? where?
AFAIK, there are two methods to store a terraform state file i.e. Locally in your machine or in a Storage account in azure .
In case storage account went down we will be screwed. What is the best
way to store the file? where?
As confirmed , You are using Standard_LRS which is not preferred as per the Microsoft Document if you are looking for high availability.
Locally redundant storage (LRS) copies your data synchronously three
times within a single physical location in the primary region. LRS is
the least expensive replication option, but is not recommended for
applications requiring high availability or durability.
So, as a solution you can change the storage account type as per your requirement to Standard_GRS or Standard_ZRS so that your data is present in two locations i.e. replicated.
You can change it by going to your storage account>>Configuration>>replication as shown below:
If You want more details on Disaster recovery (if one location is down) or data protection from Accidental Deletes then please refer the below documents:
Disaster recovery and storage account failover - Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs
Soft delete for containers - Azure Storage | Microsoft Docs
Consider I have two Storage account i,e. Storage 1, Storage 2. When there is an entry to the Storage 1, the entry should be automatically synced to Storage 2 in Azure for all(table, file, blob). Is there anyway?
As Gaurav mentioned, Redundancy doesn't mean backup, if data is deleted from the original data location, it will replicate and will be deleted from the other locations. If you are specifically looking for backup solutions, I'd recommend checking the following documentation
Below are some of the available backup options:
If the purpose of your backup is to make sure you always have data available even in case of a rack/datacenter/region level failure(azure infrastructure failure) then
we have an option to select a replication strategy when we create a storage account. In this case you would not have access to the backup copy rather these copes are used by Microsoft to recover when a failure is identified. These are -
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
For option 1, 2 and 3 the replica is not available unless Microsoft initiates failover.
Option 4 provides read-only access to the data in the secondary location, in addition to geo-replication( GRS Option 3.)
Not sure if you had a different purpose for taking a backup.
Why do we need Azure backup for our VMs (disks) on azure, when azure storage account provides different replication options like LRS, ZRS, GRS, RA-GRS.
All the data is already replicate in different region (in case of GRS), what advantes I will get out of Azure Backup.
All the data is already replicate in different region (in case of
GRS), what advantes I will get out of Azure Backup.
Replication is not backup!
It is true that when you opt for GRS replication, 6 copies of your data is maintained (3 in primary and 3 in secondary) but when you delete the data from primary, data from secondary is automatically deleted.
UPDATE
You mean, if any data is deleted/corrupted due to some error/bug, can
be reproduced from backup and it is not possible in case of storage
replication.
You're absolutely correct!
But Microsoft sells "Azure backup and Site recovery" as a BCDR
strategy. In context of any disaster, why not just rely on Storage
replication. Any advantages of Azure backup/site recovery?
I have not used Azure backup so let me answer it from Storage Replication point of view. To put things simply, "In context of Azure, a disaster is not a disaster unless Microsoft thinks it is a disaster". Till the time that happens, you don't get access to secondary assuming you have opted for GRS replication (with RA-GRS, you obviously have an option to read the data from secondary at all times).
Furthermore if you choose LRS or Premium LRS replication and there's indeed a disaster in one data center, all of your data will be lost. With Azure Backup, you at least have a copy of your data lying somewhere safe and you could recreate your environment based on that backup.
I know this question is old but MS provide a solution for Disaster recovery by Storage account
We may have 2 solution for dealing with Disaster
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-disaster-recovery-guidance?toc=/azure/storage/blobs/toc.json
it said :
If the primary endpoint becomes unavailable for any reason, the client is no longer able to write to the storage account. The following image shows the scenario where the primary has become unavailable, but no recovery has happened yet:
enter image description here
The customer initiates the account failover to the secondary endpoint. The failover process updates the DNS entry provided by Azure Storage so that the secondary endpoint becomes the new primary endpoint for your storage account, as shown in the following image:
enter image description here
I am thinking of using Azure Blob Storage for document management system which I am developing. All Blobs ( images,videos, word/excel/pdf etc) will be stored in Azure Blob storage. As I understand, I need to create container and these files can be stored within the container.
I would like to know how to safeguard against accidental/malicious deletion of the container. If a container is deleted, all the files it contains will be lost. I am trying to figure out how to put backup and recovery mechanism in place for my storage account so that it is always guaranteed that if something happens to a container, I can recover files inside it.
Is there any way provided by Microsoft Azure for such backup and recovery or Do I need explicitly write a code in such a way that files are stored in two separate Blob storage account.
Anyone with access to your storage account's key (primary or secondary; there are two keys for a storage account) can manipulate the storage account in any way they see fit. The only way to ensure nothing happens? Don't give anyone access to the key(s). If you place the storage account within a resource group that only you have permissions on, you'll at least prevent others with access to the subscription from discovering the storage account and accessing it.
Within the subscription itself, you can place a lock on the actual resource (the storage account), so that nobody with access to the subscription accidentally deletes the entire storage account.
Note: with storage account keys, you do have the ability to regenerate the keys at any time. So if you ever suspected a key was compromised, you can perform a re-gen action.
Backups
There are several backup solutions offered for blob storage in case if containers get deleted.more product info can be found here:https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/backup/
Redundancy
If you are concerned about availability, "The data in your Microsoft Azure storage account is always replicated to ensure durability and high availability. Replication copies your data, either within the same data center, or to a second data center, depending on which replication option you choose." , there are several replication options:
Locally redundant storage (LRS)
Zone-redundant storage (ZRS)
Geo-redundant storage (GRS)
Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS)
More details can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-redundancy
Managing Access
Finally, managing access to your storage account would be the best way to secure and ensure you'll avoid any loss on your data. You can provide read access only if you don't want anyone to delete files,folders etc.. through the use of SAS: Shared Access Signatures, allows you to create policies and provide access based on Read, Write, List, Delete, etc.. A quick GIF demo can be seen here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/manage-stored-access-policies-for-storage-accounts-from-within-the-azure-portal/
We are using blob to store documents and for documents management.
To prevent deletion of the blob, you can now enable soft deletion as described in here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/soft-delete-for-azure-storage-blobs-ga/
You can also create your own automation around powershell,azcopy to do incremental and full backups.
The last element would be to use RA-GRS blobs where you can read from a secondary blob in read mode in another region in case the data center goes down.
Designing Highly Available Applications using RA-GRS
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-designing-ha-apps-with-ragrs?toc=%2fazure%2fstorage%2fqueues%2ftoc.json
Use Microsoft's Azure Storage Explorer. It will allow you to download the full contents of blob containers including folders and subfolders with blobs. Conversely, you can upload to containers in the same way. Simple and free!
I've searched the web and contacted technical support yet no one seems to be able to give me a straight answer on whether items in Azure Blob Storage are backed up or not.
What I mean is, do I need to create a twin storage account as a "backup" and program copies of all content from one storage to another, or are the contents of a client's Blob Storage automatically redundantly backed up by Microsoft?
I know with AWS, storage is redundantly backed up via onsite drives as well as across other nodes in the cluster.
do I need to create a twin storage account as a "backup" and program
copies of all content from one storage to another, or are the contents
of a client's Blob Storage automatically redundantly backed up by
Microsoft?
Yes, you will need to do backup manually. Azure Storage does not back up the contents of your storage account automatically.
Azure Storage does provide geo-redundant replication (provided you configure the redundancy level for your storage account as GRS or RA-GRS) but that is not back up. Once you delete content from your primary account (location, it will automatically be removed from secondary account (geo-redundant location).
Both AWS (EBS) and Azure(Blob Storage) options provides durability by replicating the data across different data centers. This is for the high availability and durability of the data to provide the guarantee by the cloud provider.
In order to ensure that your data is durable, Azure Storage has the
ability to keep (and manage) multiple copies of your data. This is
called replication, or sometimes redundancy. When you set up your
storage account, you select a replication type. In most cases, this
setting can be modified after the storage account is set up.
For more details refer the replication section in documentation.
If you need to capture changes to the storage and allow restore to previous versions (e.g In situations like data corruption or application feature requirements like restore points, backups), you need to take a SnapShot manually. This is common for both AWS and Azure.
For more details on creating a Snapshot of Blob in Azure refer the documentation.