CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azurebackupazure-storageazure-blob-storage
IWriteApps
IWriteApps

Reputation: 993

Why backup azure storage account if it's locally or geo redundant?

So I've come across this AzCopy tool, and multiple tutorials that say it's good for backing up my storage blobs and whatnot.

Isn't Azure Storage automatically backed up? Isn't that what locally redundant means?

I just want to make sure I'm not missing something and putting my application in jeopardy by not running some external backup.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 545

Answers (2)

Leon Cullens
Leon Cullens

Reputation: 12476

Redundancy is different from back-ups. Redundancy means that all your changes are replicated to another location. In case of a failover your slave can theoretically function as a master and serve the (hopefully) latest state of your file system. However, the fact that everything is replicated also means that your accidental delete actions, file corruptions, etc. are replicated. Back-ups are meant to prevent this. In case you accidentally mess something up and perform some delete requests, you still have the back-ups and you can usually go back to any point in time (if you made a backup at that time of course).

And of course it's not a bad idea to be not fully dependent on Azure.

Upvotes: 4

Michael B
Michael B

Reputation: 12228

The most important thing about any backup policy is that before you create it you decide what you are protecting against, and what sort of data are you backing up.

If the data you backing up is an offsite backup of working data. If access to that data is restricted to admin personnel and they all know what the data is. Then replication could well be all you need to protect from a hardware failure on Azure.

If however you are backing up customer data, or file data that fred in accounts randomly deletes when he falls asleep at the keyboard then you have a different threat model and you should consider your backups accordingly.

Where you back it up is very much a matter of personal requirements and philosophy. I have known customers who will keep backups on Azure and AWS (even though their only compute workload was Azure) If in your threat model you want to protect against MS going bust and selling all of their kit on ebay one morning, then it makes sense to back up elsewhere. Or you can decide that you trust Azure to go bust and just split data across multiple regions.

TL;DR

Understand what you are protecting your data from, and design your backup policy from that.

Upvotes: 0

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