Quick Note — Recommend a Backup and Recovery Solution for Compute
AZ-305 › Unit 3 › Design solutions for backup and disaster recovery › Recommend a backup and recovery solution for compute
Quick Note — Recommend a Backup and Recovery Solution for Compute
A small bank wakes up Tuesday morning to find half its transaction-processing VMs crippled by ransomware. The incident commander asks the architect three questions in rapid succession: what can we restore, how recent is it, and how long will recovery take. The answer is not in the runbook on her screen — it was decided eighteen months ago, when somebody chose a vault redundancy, set a backup policy, and either did or did not enable soft-delete. This lesson is about making those upstream decisions deliberately so that downstream incidents have one obvious path through them.
Retrieval target
- Recommend a Backup and Recovery Solution for Compute
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
Two-tier Azure VM backup: Snapshot tier + Vault tier | When you back up an Azure VM, Backup first takes a disk snapshot stored locally (instant, retained for 5 days by default — used for fast restores). Then it copies the snapshot to the Recovery Services Vault for longer retention. Snapshot-tier restores are fast (no copy); vault-tier restores fetch from the vault and take longer but cover the full retention window (up to 99 years). |
Instant Restore | A restore from the snapshot tier (not from the vault), available while the recovery point is still in its 5-day snapshot retention. Bypasses the vault download and gets a VM back in minutes instead of hours. Pick the right RP and restore disk → attach to a new VM. After the snapshot ages out, you can still restore — just slower, from the vault. |
Cross-Region Restore (CRR) | An optional Recovery Services Vault feature that lets you restore a VM, file, or disk in the paired region without waiting for Microsoft to declare a regional failover. Requires the vault to be GRS-redundant (not LRS or ZRS) and CRR explicitly enabled. Costs more (writes also go to the paired region). Use to meet compliance audits or run cross-region drills. |
File-level recovery from a VM backup | An option where Azure Backup mounts the VM's recovery point as iSCSI-attached drives on a recovery client machine (running a downloaded script). You browse the file system and copy out specific files / folders — no need to restore the entire VM disk just to get one config file back. Available for both Windows and Linux VMs, from any RSV recovery point. |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.