Backup and Disaster Recovery Protection on Azure [FAQ]

25. Dec, 2009 4 Comments

As at launch in January 2010  data on Azure is replicated three times in the Azure storage system, in addition the data is replicated across at least two geographic datacenters (although Microsoft did not provide any more details on the timing for replication across datacenters).

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4 Responses to “Backup and Disaster Recovery Protection on Azure [FAQ]”

  1. Vishwanath 24. Jan, 2010 at 9:30 pm

    Hi,

    Is there any additional cost for DR?

    regards
    Vishwa

  2. admin 24. Jan, 2010 at 10:34 pm

    Disaster Recovery is inbuilt into Azure. Each database is replicated three times and switchover upon a hardware fail is claimed to be near-instantaneous and seemless.
    The inbuilt backup solutions will be charged at a premium when they are launch during 2010.

  3. Elliot 19. May, 2010 at 5:21 am

    Hey, at the moment there’s no disaster recovery in SQL Azure if a database update operation goes wrong!!!!!!

    We are using SQL Azure. We applied a script, automatically generated by SQL Server Management Studio 2008 R2, to change the data type of a column in a table. The script wasn’t compatible with SQL Azure, and used a backup-table / drop-table / recreate-table approach. When run, the only bit that worked properly was the DROP operation!!! Net result: table gone!!!

    I rang Microsoft to ask them to get the table back. After 6.5 hours, they told me that they couldn’t. The delay suggests to me that they tried but failed.

    Your biggest headache when using SQL Azure is backup management. There’s no native support for downloading the .bak file from SQL Azure – there are some data sync tools – and some people have had a go at developing freeware solutions – but all of these approaches are unreliable.

    To add insult to injury, you are charged for all transfers into and out of SQL Azure. I.e. they charge you money to backup your own data!!!

    Anyone migrating to SQL Azure right now would need to consider this issue very carefully. If you don’t need the scalability benefits of the Azure environment, you’re better off keeping everything in-house for now until they get the tool support sorted.

  4. admin 19. May, 2010 at 8:07 am

    There’s no doubt that the lack of backup solutions is currently the major flaw on the entire Azure platform, really surprising that it was launched with no inbuilt backup solution.

    Until something is released (probably in H2 2010) all we have are cumbersome workarounds such as using the Sync framework.