Azure Storage

Backup options for Azure Blob Storage, updated for 2021, spolier - we now have native blob backup!

From the early days of Azure, it has been possible to configure storage accounts to be geo-redundant. Geo-redundant storage is replicated 3 times in the local region and then a further 3 times in the paired region, so that should the primary region go down, data can be accessed in the secondary. The big problem with this, however, is that the failover to the secondary region is under Microsoft’s control. Microsoft are the ones to decide as to whether the primary region is impaired enough to require storage to be failed over to the secondary region.

While you can create an Azure Storage account with an ARM template very quickly, it’s not been possible to create anything inside this storage account, such as blob containers, tables, queues, using the same ARM template. If you wanted to do this, you either needed to look at running scripts after your template completes, or using something like Terraform, which does allow you to create these things. However, a recent update to the ARM schema means you can now create Blob containers in your template.

Recently I came across a question on StackOverflow that was asking about how they could backup Azure Blob storage. They finished this question asking I can’t be the only one who needs to do this”. This struck a chord with me, as I recall feeling exactly the same when I had a need to do this. It feels like something that is so obvious, that should be built into the platform.