The following guide explains step by step how you can run an ad-hoc backup through Azure Backup for an Azure Virtual Machine.


1. Navigate on the VM you want to backup through the Azure portal , click to the tab ‘Backup’ and then ‘Backup now’.


2. Set the retention period for the backup that you will take. Remember that the running backup is ad-hoc and is not currently associated with a backup policy.


3. The backup is currently in progress; you can see this on the top left side of the portal


4. By Navigating to the Recovery Services Vault and ‘Backup Items,’ you will see the current backup item count.


5. Click on the Azure Virtual Machine, which is currently in process, we will see that there are still some warnings on the Last Backup Status. The warning appears because we are running the first full backup for this server, so we have no previous backup point. It might take significant time to complete, but any additional one will run as an incremental backup, making it significantly faster.




6. You will see the following screen once the backup is completed. Now, we have a valid backup for your virtual machine.




Azure gives a great variety of options in backing up and disaster recovery for various technologies:
-Virtual Machines on Azure
-Azure Blobs
-On-premises servers
-Vmware
-Hyper-V
-Azure Managed Disks
-Azure Files shares
-SQL Server in Azure VMs
-SAP HANA databases in Azure VMs
-Azure Database for PostgreSQL servers
-Azure Kubernetes service
Here you can check the full list of the supported technologies -> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-overview#what-can-i-back-up.
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