Microsoft Azure Backup

This product is an absolute peace of mind when I am doing heavy automation testing. There have been so many real-time scenarios where a script I wrote went rogue and deleted some config files or messed up the database schema, and being able to just do an instant file-level recovery saved my whole day. I love that I can just mount a recovery point as a local drive and copy back exactly what I need without waiting hours for a full VM restore. Another cool thing is the security side, like soft delete feature. I once accidentally deleted a whole backup vault because I was rushing through the portal but since ADO keeps it for 14 days, I was able to get it all back without any data loss. It is just very reliable and once you get past the initial setup it feels very rock solid.

It works very well as a backup service. The retention is really good. Have not had any issues with the recovery of VMs and their data.

Azure Backup is a robust tool, providing strongs features when it comes to deploying a solid information system. The possibility to backup data accross different regions in the world increase overall performances. The solution support a large range of workloads, I like how rich, yet straightforward and simple the interface is. I also like the fact that you can use metrics from Azure backup to generate reports and plan back up strategies.

Few months back where I needed to roll back a database for an api test that failed miserably and it took over an hour just to get the data back from the vault. When you are in the middle of a sprint and everyone is waiting on test results, that kind of delay is just unacceptable. I also can't see the costs or how much storage I am burning through because it makes it feel like I am flying blind. Another thing that bugs me is the lack of flexibility with the backup policies. As a tester I sometimes want to take multiple snapshots a day when I am doing heavy deployments/tests but the ADO backup is really designed for once a day or once a week schedules. I also noticed that if there is a regional outage like a power interruption, the backups can be intermittent or even fail to start. It is good safety net but the high learning curve and the slow recovery times make it feel very clunky compared to some other tools I have used in the past.

The cost of backup is very expensive and there is no way to extract and have the backup run at other places, for example other cloud providers or on prem.

The pricing might be complex sometimes, protected instances fees and actual storage usage make monthly bills difficult to predict and sometimes expensive for long-term data. Limited frequency of another issue as standard WM backups are restricted to once per day, which is insifficient for high-traffic applications that require houly or near-instant recovery point. Protectings on-premises servers require installing and maitaining additional softwares (MARS or MABS), that adds management overhead compared to cloud-native ressources