Backup sources Anycloud Backup for Azure supports two Azure native instances, Azure Virtual Machines and Azure SQL Database service. Both are calculated based on a per-instance-model VM Anycloud Backup for Azure can produce cloud-native snapshots and image-level backups of VMs. To create backups of Azure VMs, Anycloud Backup for Azure creates backup jobs. A backup job is a collection of settings that define the way backup operations are performed - What to backup, where to store it and when to start the backup job. SQL instances To create backups of Azure SQL databases, Anycloud Backup for Azure creates backup jobs. A backup job is a collection of settings that define the way backup operations are performed - What to backup, where to store it and when to start the backup job. One backup job can process multiple SQL databases within different, or the same, region. Important – Anycloud Backup for Azure does not support back up of databases hosted by Azure Arc-enabled SQL managed instances and SQL Servers on Azure Arc-enabled servers.

Anycloud Backup for Azure starts the backup jobs automatically based on how the scheduler has been defined. The scheduler defines how often the Azure data is being backed up. The following can be chosen: Frequency · Daily — the backup job will create restore points repeatedly throughout a day on specific days. · Weekly — the backup job will create restore points once a day on specific days. · Monthly — the backup job will create restore points once a month on a specific day. · Yearly — the backup job will create restore points once a year on a specific day. Retention · 1 year · 3 years · 5 years · 10 years

Azure supports manually creation of snapshots of Azure VMs that are added to an existing backup job. The snapshots you can view in the Azure snaphost view, which are used for CBT (change-block-tracking), are needed to perform incremental backups.Each snapshot is saved to the same Azure region where the protected Azure VM reside. They are necessary to the functionality of Azure backup Important - Anycloud Backup for Azure does not include any snapshots created manually within the backup chain and does not apply the configured retention policy settings to these snapshots. This means that the snapshots are kept within the tenants Microsoft Azure environment until removed manually. They can be disabled for weekly and full backup policies because full backups are performed every time. This will decrease the number of snapshots, but they must remain within the Azure subscription, as they are crucial to the service, as changes to the backup are part of the performing the newest backup.

Before you start protecting Azure workloads, consider the following: When backing up Azure VMs with assigned IPv6 addresses, the backup does not include these addresses. Consequently, if you need to restore these VMs, you must manually assign IPv6 addresses to the restored VMs in the Microsoft Azure portal once the restoration is complete. Due to Microsoft Azure limitations, a subscription can have a maximum of 50 tags. Therefore, Anycloud Backup for Azure can create a snapshot only if this tag limit is not exceeded for the subscription containing the processed Azure VM. If the limit is reached, the operation will fail with a serialization error. For more details on subscription limits, refer to Microsoft Docs. If you choose to back up Azure resources managed by specific subscriptions, belonging to specific resource groups, or assigned specific tags, it may take up to 24 hours for Anycloud Backup for Azure to detect newly deployed resources or those recently assigned the specified tags. To expedite this process and update the backup scope list, perform a resource rescan as described in the “Performing Backup” section. When performing indexing operations, Anycloud Backup for Azure uses the Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 and New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) v2 protocols for authentication against the processed file shares. Therefore, these authentication protocols must be enabled on the file shares you plan to index. If not, the indexing of the file shares will fail. For more information on Azure Files identity-based authentication options for SMB access, refer to Microsoft Docs. If you delete a file share from Microsoft Azure, its snapshots will also be deleted. To safeguard your snapshots from accidental deletion, you can enable the file share soft delete option. For more information on the soft delete option for Azure file shares, refer to Microsoft Docs. Due to Microsoft Azure limitations, Anycloud Backup for Azure cannot restore Cosmos DB accounts encrypted with customer-managed keys. For more information, refer to Microsoft Docs. Anycloud Backup for Azure does not support backup of Cosmos DB accounts that have periodic backup or multi-region writes enabled. Adding Azure SQL Server accounts using Microsoft Entra ID authentication is not supported. To add an Azure SQL Server account, you must provide the credentials of a SQL Server Admin account. Anycloud Backup for Azure does not support backup of databases hosted by Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instances and SQL Servers on Azure Arc-enabled servers. You can create SQL backup policies to protect Azure SQL databases running on SQL Servers and databases on SQL Managed Instances. If you need to protect a database hosted by a SQL Server on an Azure VM, create an Azure VM backup policy. Note that in this scenario, you will not be able to restore a single database without restoring the entire VM. When restoring virtual disks of an Azure VM to a new location from a cloud-native snapshot or image-level backup, Anycloud Backup for Azure places the disks in the specified location as standalone virtual disks and does not attach them to any Azure VM. Anycloud Backup for Azure supports file-level recovery for Microsoft Windows basic volumes only. If you use Windows Storage Spaces to store data, you must restore the entire Azure VM to access your files and folders. For more information on Storage Spaces, refer to Microsoft Doc. Anycloud Backup for Azure does not support restoring to the original location of locked Azure VMs and Azure virtual disks. For more information on the lock feature, refer to Microsoft Docs. File and folder restoration is supported for the following file systems only: FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, ext4, XFS, Btrfs. File-level recovery is not supported for VMs with virtual disks encrypted using Azure Disk Encryption. This means you cannot restore or browse guest OS files on disks encrypted by BitLocker for Windows-based Azure VMs, by DM-Crypt for Linux-based Azure VMs, or by any custom disk encryption tools.