The following article is part 4 of our many-part series, “Hybrid Cloud for IT Pros”. Click HERE often for the ever-growing full list of articles in this series.
At my IT Camp events, when discussing this topic, I’ll often ask my IT Pro friends in attendance the following questions; usually with the following results:
“How many of you have played with Windows Server Backup, the built-in file backup and recovery utility?”
About 50%-75% of the hands go up.
“How many of you are using Windows Server Backup as your main server file-system backup tool?”
Maybe one or two hands go up. And we all laugh.I’m not surprised! It’s a very simple tool, and maybe didn’t do all we need for things such as long-term archiving and off-site storage.. so we went with other value-add providers. But still, if you want to simply create a backup schedule and save multiple recovery points, Windows Server backup is still a nice solution.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to take that simple capability and, rather than storing backups to another local storage device, we stored directly into the cheap and always-available cloud storage that is Microsoft Azure?
“Yeah! I’d love that!”
Your wish: GRANTED.
Azure Backup is Microsoft’s Windows Server Backup – cloud-ified. At the heart of it it involves an Azure subscription, a storage account, a credential to allow the service to trust the server (or client), and an agent installed on your local server (or client).
“Kevin.. you keep saying ‘(or client)’. Are you saying that this Azure Backup can also backup files from Windows Client operating systems?”
That’s right! A recent update to this capability was to allow the backup not only of all supported server operating systems (Server 2008 R2 and newer), but also of client operating systems from Windows 7 through Windows 10.
“Very cool! But how do I set it up?”
Here is my very own Step-by-Step guide, just for you: Step-by-Step: Windows Azure Backup