Microsoft has announced that the Azure Backup MARS agent will support the protection of System State on Windows Server. This is a preview release.
I started talking about Azure Backup 3 years ago, and one of the “we’re not doing it” questions was “does it backup system state”. The answer was no. Azure Backup listened and now you can backup your system state to Azure using the MARS agent.
Scenarios discussed by the Azure Backup team include Active Directory, file server configurations, and IIS server configurations, where restoring files & folders is not enough; the metadata that makes those files & folders useful is stored in System State so the ability to restore that meta data is also important.
Supported versions of Windows Server in this preview release are:
- W2008 R2
- WS2012
- WS2012 R2
- Windows Server 2016
Do you want support for Windows Server 2003? Let me sell you some Ace of Base and Vanilla Ice cassettes!
This is good news, a part of the continuous improvement of Azure Backup driven by your feedback.