This site is running on an Azure Basic A2 VM with 127 GB of storage. I back it up in two ways:
- There is an Azure Backup (AB) agent installed in the guest OS, and that backs up an export of MySQL and the IIS content.
- I use the (preview) feature that allows you to grab a daily backup of a VM. This is what I want to focus on.
I have deployed a GRS backup vault. The usage summary is:
The storage cost of the backup this month will be around €2.5776 (72 * €0.0358 per GB) and the instance cost will be €7.447 (The VM size falls into 50-500 GB).
There is a daily backup with 4 weeks of retention. Right now, there are 29 days of history:
Backup can be slow (ranges from 47 minutes to 4 hours and 13 minutes), but I haven’t had any issues.
I haven’t had to do a restore, but so far, so good.
So Azure backup uses deduplication and/or compression for VM backups?
Could you tell us your dedup rate? 72 GB for 29days in total seems pretty good.
Thanks,
Thomas
No dedup. It takes up just what it needs in incremental backups and it compresses the data.
> incremental backups
But that happens on the block level of the VM storage, or?
I guess so. I haven’t seen it described anywhere.
Any reason why you host the website in a VM and not using a Azure website?
I want to own a VM 🙂 The website would have worked very well, I’m sure. But I wanted to experience Azure for myself – my job doesn’t involve much “owning IT”. Plus by using my own MySQL, I have more options to me than by using ClearDB. I could have done website-VLAN VPN for that – but it wasn’t an option back when I moved to Azure.