Azure Backup

 Describe Azure backup benefits:

Azure Backup is the Azure-based service you can use to back up (or protect) and restore your data in the Microsoft cloud. Azure Backup replaces your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution that is reliable, secure, and cost-competitive.

Azure Backup offers multiple components that you download and deploy on the appropriate computer, server, or in the cloud. The component, or agent, that you deploy depends on what you want to protect. All Azure Backup components (no matter whether you're protecting data on-premises or in the cloud) can be used to back up data to a Recovery Services vault in Azure.

Key benefits:

Offload on-premises backup. Azure Backup offers a simple solution for backing up your on-premises resources to the cloud. Get short and long-term backup without the need to deploy complex on-premises backup solutions.

• Back up Azure IaaS VMs. Azure Backup provides independent and isolated backups to guard against accidental destruction of original data. Backups are stored in a Recovery Services vault with built-in management of recovery points. Configuration and scalability is simple, backups are optimized, and you can easily restore as needed.

• Get unlimited data transfer. Azure Backup does not limit the amount of inbound or outbound data you transfer, or charge for the data that is transferred. Outbound data refers to data transferred from a Recovery Services vault during a restore operation. If you perform an offline initial backup using the Azure Import/Export service to import large amounts of data, there is a cost associated with inbound data.

• Keep data secure. Data encryption allows for secure transmission and storage of your data in the public cloud. You store the encryption passphrase locally, and it is never transmitted or stored in Azure. If it is necessary to restore any of the data, only you have encryption passphrase, or key.

• Get app-consistent backups. An application-consistent backup means a recovery point has all required data to restore the backup copy. Azure Backup provides application-consistent backups, which ensure additional fixes are not required to restore the data. Restoring application-consistent data reduces the restoration time, allowing you to quickly return to a running state.

• Retain short and long-term data. You can use Recovery Services vaults for short-term and long-term data retention. Azure doesn't limit the length of time data can remain in a Recovery Services vault. You can keep it for as long as you like. Azure Backup has a limit of 9999 recovery points per protected instance.

• Automatic storage management. Hybrid environments often require heterogeneous storage - some on-premises and some in the cloud. With Azure Backup, there is no cost for using on-premises storage devices. Azure Backup automatically allocates and manages backup storage, and it uses a pay-as-you-use model, so that you only pay for the storage you consume.

• Multiple storage options. Azure Backup offers two types of replication to keep your storage/data highly available.

• Locally redundant storage (LRS) replicates your data three times (it creates three copies of your data) in a storage scale unit in a datacenter. All copies of the data exist within the same region. LRS is a low-cost option for protecting your data from local hardware failures.
• Geo-redundant storage (GRS) is the default and recommended replication option. GRS replicates your data to a secondary region (hundreds of miles away from the primary location of the source data). GRS costs more than LRS, but GRS provides a higher level of durability for your data, even if there is a regional outage.

Azure backup center:

Backup Center provides a single unified management experience in Azure for enterprises to govern, monitor, operate, and analyze backups at scale. As such, it's consistent with Azure’s native management experiences.

Some of the key benefits of Backup Center include:

• Single pane of glass to manage backups. Backup Center is designed to function well across a large and distributed Azure environment. You can use Backup Center to efficiently manage backups spanning multiple workload types, vaults, subscriptions, regions, and tenants.
• Datasource-centric management. Backup Center provides views and filters that are centered on the datasources that you're backing up. Datasources like VMs and databases. This feature lets a resource owner or a backup admin administer backup items across different vaults. The admin can also filter views by datasource-specific properties. These properties include datasource subscription, datasource resource group, and datasource tags.
• Connected experiences. Backup Center provides native integrations to existing Azure services that enable management at scale. For example, Backup Center uses the Azure Policy experience to help you govern your backups. It uses Azure workbooks and Azure Monitor Logs to help you view detailed reports on backups. So you don't need to learn any new principles to use the varied features that Backup Center offers. You can also discover community resources from the Backup Center.

Recovery Service Vault:

The Recovery Services vault is a storage entity in Azure that stores data.

Recovery Services vaults store backup data for various Azure services such as IaaS VMs (Linux or Windows) and Azure SQL databases. Recovery Services vaults support System Center DPM, Windows Server, Azure Backup Server, and other services. Recovery Services vaults make it easy to organize your backup data, while minimizing management overhead.

The Recovery Services vault can be used to back up Azure file shares.

Note:

Within an Azure subscription, you can create up to 25 Recovery Services vaults per region.

Backup Policy:

Backup policy specifies frequency and time at which items will be backed up and how long backup copies are retained.

VM Backup:

Select a VM to back up:

Create a simple scheduled daily backup to a Recovery Services vault.

1. In the menu on the left, select Virtual machines.
2. From the list, choose a VM to back up. If you used the sample VM quickstart commands, the VM is named myVM in the myResourceGroup resource group.
3. In the Operations section, choose Backup. The Enable backup window opens.

Enable backup on a VM:

A Recovery Services vault is a logical container that stores the backup data for each protected resource, such as Azure VMs. When the backup job for a protected resource runs, it creates a recovery point inside the Recovery Services vault. You can then use one of these recovery points to restore data to a given point in time.

1. Select Create new and provide a name for the new vault, such as myRecoveryServicesVault.

2. If not already selected, choose Use existing, then select the resource group of your VM from the drop-down menu.                                                                                                         

                               

3. By default, the vault is set for Geo-Redundant storage. To further protect your data, this storage redundancy level ensures that your backup data is replicated to a secondary Azure region that's hundreds of miles away from the primary region.

   You create and use policies to define when a backup job runs and how long the recovery points are stored. The default protection policy runs a backup job each day and retains recovery points for 30 days. You can use these default policy values to quickly protect your VM.

4. To accept the default backup policy values, select Enable Backup.

It takes a few moments to create the Recovery Services vault.

 Start a backup job

 You can start a backup now rather than wait for the default policy to run the job at the scheduled time. This first backup job creates a full recovery point. Each backup job after this initial backup creates incremental recovery points. Incremental recovery points are storage and time-efficient, as they only transfer changes made since the last backup.

1. On the Backup window for your VM, select Backup now.                                                           

   
2.  To accept the backup retention policy of 30 days, leave the default Retain Backup Till date. To start the job, select Backup.

Monitor the backup job:

 In the Backup window for your VM, the status of the backup and number of completed restore points are shown. Once the VM backup job is complete, information on the Last backup time, Latest restore point, and Oldest restore point is shown on the right-hand side of the Overview window.

Clean up deployment:

When no longer needed, you can disable protection on the VM, remove the restore points and Recovery Services vault, then delete the resource group and associated VM resources

1. Select the Backup option for your VM.

2. Choose Stop backup.                                                                                                               

   
   
   

3. Select Delete Backup Data from the drop-down menu.

4. In the Type the name of the Backup item dialog, enter your VM name, such as myVM. Select Stop Backup.

   Once the VM backup has been stopped and recovery points removed, you can delete the resource group. If you used an existing VM, you may wish to leave the resource group and VM in place.

5. In the menu on the left, select Resource groups.

6. From the list, choose your resource group. If you used the sample VM quickstart commands, the resource group is named myResourceGroup.

7. Select Delete resource group. To confirm, enter the resource group name, then select Delete.