I just realized that we don't have a solid backup plan if Azure were to go offline completely. Everything we back up is stored within Azure itself, but I'm concerned about what happens if it all goes down for an extended period. We do have some limited offline fallback with USB sticks and laptops, but that's only good for a day or two without access to our core systems.
Is it typical for others to have offline or local backups outside of Azure these days, or are most people just relying on cloud solutions?
5 Answers
For non-essential workloads, we rely on zone redundancy, but for critical ones, we use geo-redundancy which covers us for an incredibly high uptime. Sure, if Azure tanks completely, we're in a tough spot, but we weigh that risk and think it's acceptable.
A lot of people struggle with fully offline backups due to how cloud services work, especially with PaaS solutions. But for critical systems, multi-region or even multi-cloud setups can really lower the risk, based on what we've learned from historical cloud outages.
We do regular offline backups for our Azure SQL databases. We save .bacpac files, .bak files for our SQL databases running on VMs, .vhd images of VMs, and zipped backups of our source code. It’s a good safety net.
Honestly, if Azure went down for a long time, I'd have bigger issues to deal with than just work. We'd be looking at major catastrophes like natural disasters or cyberattacks.
From what I've seen, a good practice is to set up an alternate region with replication for failover, depending on what your workloads are. It really helps reduce the risk if something goes wrong with your main Azure region.
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