LASER Backups

The Microsoft ‘Azure Backup Service’ enables one to backup and restore data from the Azure cloud. This service is utilised to protect and support the research projects hosted by the Azure platform, underpinned by a backup policy and the data retention arrangements for any given project’s virtual research environment (VRE).

The Azure Backup Service is based upon the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services (MARS) agent and uses a Backup Service Vault, connected to Azure storage services. These agents will be utilised within the VRE environment, consisting of various Azure resources, such as VMs and File Shared Storage, SQL databases, Web App services and many more.

Backup Retention

To develop both a consistent cost and support model, an evolving set of standard expectations have been agreed and applied to the backup policies and data retention requirements across the various VRE projects developed within the LASER service.

By default, this will be a retention period based upon the backup policy schedule defined below, of Daily VM backup and Storage backup at 7pm and 6:30pm respectively (UTC).

Due to the agreed backup policies applied to each resource, restoration of services may take longer than expected. The following table describes the backup retention policy.

Backups/Snapshot	VM OS	Shared File Storage
Daily	7 days	28 days
Weekly	0 weeks	4 weeks
Monthly	0 months	12 months
Yearly	0 years	1 years

To recover data backed up by the Azure Backup Service, submit a request via the University of Leeds IT web query form.