Azure Back-up Just Got Better

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I don’t know about you but I found the requirement to provide or make a certificate in order to set up Azure Back-up a bit on the cumbersome side.  I was very happy to see it is a much easier and streamlined process to set up the Azure Back-up Vault. 

Vault credentials have replaced certificates as the way to register your Azure service with your server. You can still use certificates, however, vault credentials are easier to use because you use the Azure portal to generate and download vault credentials. The following outlines the process for creation of the Azure Back-up Vault:

  1. Sign in to the Management Portal.

  2. Click Recovery Services, then select the backup vault that you want to register with a server. The Quick Start page for that backup vault appears.

  3. On the Quick Start page, click Download vault credentials to prompt the portal to generate and download the vault credentials you will use to register your server with the backup vault.

  4. The portal will generate a vault credential using a combination of the vault name and the current date. Click Save to download the vault credentials to the local account's downloads folder, or select Save As from the Save menu to specify a location for the vault credentials. You cannot edit the vault credentials so there is no reason to click Open. Once the credentials have been downloaded, you'll be prompted to Open the folder. Click x to close this menu.

Also in the area of Azure back-up news is first of more to come around  availability of long term retention for Azure cloud backups as announced with  Update Rollup 3 (UR3) for System Center 2012 R2 Data Protection Manager and the latest release of Microsoft Azure Backup. While we still have a ways to go (and we will) this recent announcement sets the stage for more to come.  With this latest announcement we will  keep up to 120 backup copies in Azure (that is one back-up per month with data kept for 9 years).    See the recent blog post:  https://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2014/08/27/introducing-long-term-retention-for-dpm-azure-cloud-backups.aspx.

Kathleen Molosky 2013

Kathleen (Kat) Molosky