Cram sheet — Implement backup and recovery

Two protection stories are offered in the same option lists throughout this topic, and they answer different requirements. Backup gets a thing back. Site Recovery keeps a workload running somewhere else. Deciding which the stem asks for resolves most of the topic before you compare any options.

Backup versus Site Recovery

• Site Recovery replicates workloads from a primary site to a secondary location; when an outage occurs you fail over and access apps from there, and fail back once the primary is running again.
• Backup stores backups in a Recovery Services vault with built-in management of recovery points, isolated from the original data.
• Neither substitutes for the other. Failing over does not recover a deleted file; restoring a backup does not keep a service available during a regional outage.

Two kinds of vault

• Recovery Services vault — the long-standing vault, used for Azure VM backup and for short-term and long-term retention.
• Backup vault — the newer vault type, for the workloads that use it.
• Both support zone redundancy, with optional zone redundancy for the backup data itself.
• ⚠ The exam asks which vault a given workload needs. The mistake is assuming one vault type serves everything, and the objective list names both precisely because they are not interchangeable.

Policies, restores and reporting

• A backup policy carries the schedule and the retention. Retention is why the policy, rather than the backup, is what a compliance requirement is really about.
• Azure Backup provides built-in monitoring and alerting in the Recovery Services vault, available without any additional management infrastructure — and it can be scaled up by using Azure Monitor.
• ⚠ So a stem asking for basic backup reporting does not require a Log Analytics workspace. Adding one is the over-engineered answer that looks thorough.
• Outbound data charges apply to data transferred from a vault during a restore, which is why "restore everything to check" is not a free rehearsal.

Traps

Check yourself

Where these figures come from

Every figure above was read from the raw documentation below on the day this sheet was written. The sha1 is git hash-object over the bytes as fetched, so a doc that changes underneath this sheet can be detected rather than assumed.