Microsoft Azure SQL and Storage backup

Question

I have the following set up:

• Azure service
• Azure SQL database
• Azure Table Storage
• Azure Blob Storage

I am trying to develop a backup strategy for this service. The thing is, that SQL, Tables and BLOBs should be synced. In the backup all three of those have to be of the same version. (backups taken at the same moment). And the main problem is - I can only afford several minutes downtime, not more than that.

What should I do? May be there is existing solution?

Answer 1

Windows Azure Storage supports geo-replication for Blobs, Tables and Queues. Data in the storage account is made durable by replicating transactions across different storage nodes in the same region (LRS) or a secondary region (GRS). GRS is the default redundancy option when creating a storage account. Refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2013/12/11/introducing-read-access-geo-replicated-storage-ra-grs-for-windows-azure-storage.aspx for more details.

If you want to build a custom backup solution then you could use the techniques suggested in the below 2 blogs 1) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/04/30/protecting-your-blobs-against-application-errors.aspx 2) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/05/03/protecting-your-tables-against-application-errors.aspx

Answer 2

I am not sure of the exact use case of why you need to backup azure table and blob. You can backup All the above services without downtime; might be there would be slight glitch or bottleneck performance with SQL database durning back.

The single shot answer is to write a custom script which would read the data from azure table ( or SQL database, or the required service ) make a archive (packaging) and store it back.

The important thing to note here is where would storage backups, broadly speaking generally store the archives in blob. In this case you have thing where you would be storing, if you are storing on-premises you need calculate upon the storage locally, out bandwidth cost and latency of the data transfer from azure.

PS : cloud storage by itself has good leave of availability and durability, you further improve these factors by enabling geo-replication