Has anyone come up with a good way to do backups of SQL Azure databases?
The two approaches seem to be SSIS or BCP. SSIS looks like it requires a local install of MS SQL 2008 which I don't have. BCP looks a bit more promising but I haven't managed to find any examples of using it with SQL Azure as of yet.
Azure SQL Database schedules one full backup every week. To provide PITR within the entire retention period, the system must store additional full, differential, and transaction log backups for up to a week longer than the configured retention period.
Azure SQL Server automatically creates full backups every week, differential backups every 12 hours, and transaction log backups every 5-10 minutes. The backups are stored in RA-GRS storage blobs that are replicated to a paired data center for protection against a data center outage.
Azure Backup for SQL VMsAzure Backup provides an Enterprise class backup capability for SQL Server on Azure VMs. All backups are stored and managed in a Recovery Services vault.
At the PDC09 they announced SQL Azure Data Sync, which was an early preview that is designed to let you keep your local SQL Server in sync with an Azure SQL Server.
In terms of database backups for maintenance etc, then of course that is part of the service you pay for with Azure that MS manage.
The sync framework team have a blog on a number of issues surrounding data syncronisation between Azure and a local DB - http://blogs.msdn.com/sync/default.aspx
My personal favorite solution is to use Azure Mobile Services to do a nightly backup & export from SQL Azure to a .bacpac file hosted in Azure Storage. This solution doesn't require a 3rd party tool, no bcp or powershell, is 100% cloud and doesn't require a local hosted SQL Server instance to download/copy/backup anything.
There are about 8 different steps, but they're all pretty easy: http://geekswithblogs.net/BenBarreth/archive/2013/04/15/how-to-create-a-nightly-backup-of-your-sql-azure.aspx
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