Backups

Introduction

Backups are a critical part of any service architecture. They let us restore the business in case of accidental deletion or data corruption. Almost everything can be restored, minus some configurations:

• Data

• Containers

• Databases

• Accounts

Cosmos DB offers two different backup options that can be set at the account level:

• Periodical backup

• Continuous backup

The data is copied on Azure Blob Storage, encrypted with the same key used for the primary SSD storage.

Note: Backups don’t affect performance, availability, or RU consumption.

Periodic backup

In Cosmos DB, periodic backup is the default option, which copies the data on a configurable regular interval. Included in the price, we get the following configuration:

• Backups are created every 4 hours.

• Backups are retained for 8 hours (two backups).

• Backups are retained for 30 days if the database or container is deleted.

Each backup also has two copies:

• One in the same region as the write region.

  • For multi-write region accounts, one of the regions is used.

• One on a different region through geo-redundant storage (GRS).

Configuration

There are three options we can set for periodic backups:

• Backup interval

• Backup retention

• Storage redundancy