Both Backup and Site Recovery are important to an effective disaster recovery solution as both services capture data and offer restore semantics. Backup ensures that your data is safe and recoverable while Site Recovery keeps your workloads available when/if an outage occurs.
Azure Backup is a service that allows you to back up your data to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This includes both on-premises VMs and Azure VMs. Backups are stored in a Recovery Services vault with built-in management of recovery points. Configuration and scalability are simple, backups are optimized, and you can easily restore as needed.
When you enable backup for an Azure VM, a backup extension is installed on the VM if the VM is running. This extension takes a storage-level snapshot,and transferred to the recovery services vault. After the data is sent to the vault, a recovery point is created. By default, snapshots are retained for two days before they are deleted.
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Azure Site Recovery involves orchestrating failovers and failbackups from one site to another in an automated fashion. Azure Site Recovery is a tool that allows you to perform this orchestration and automate the replication of Azure VMs between regions, on-premises virtual machines, and physical servers to Azure.
Azure Site Recovery includes the ability to replicate your data from one datacenter to another. The other datacenter in this solution would be the Azure IaaS environment in the cloud.
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Azure backup vs site recovery
While Azure Backup focuses on backups, Azure Site Recovery is more a replication mechanism.
Azure Backup allows many more granular backup and retention policies compared to Azure Site Recovery. For very specific data restores, Azure Backup is the solution that would allow the data to be restored and recovered in specific data loss events.
The Azure Backup data is typically retained for 30 days or less. The amount of data that a backup solution needs to process is very high due to a larger RPO (Recovery Point Objective). This leads to a higher RTO (Recovery Time Objective). Compared to this Azure Site Recovery has a very low RPO and RTO. The RPO might be as low as 30 seconds while the RTO might be of 5-30 minutes. The smaller RTO is because it is in sync with the source. Site Recovery needs only operational recovery data.
Conclusion:
Both Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery, are effective disaster solutions that back up and restore data. They both work together to ensure complete business continuity, but they have slightly different purposes. While Azure backup can help you to restore a corrupted file, Azure Site Recovery will replicate the data and configuration of a system to another datacenter.
Azure Backup protects data on-premises and in the cloud. Azure Site Recovery coordinates replication, failover, and failback. Both services are important because your disaster recovery solution needs to keep your data safe and recoverable (Backup) and keep your workloads available (Site Recovery) when outages occur.
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