Hello folks,
today, Microsoft announced public preview for a feature I really appreciate: Azure Backup Instant Restore! Instant Restore is a feature that allows you to recover single items on file and folder level from an Azure Backup restore point to a Windows operating system. How it works? Go on reading.
Basically, Instant Restore is used to mount a recovery point to your Windows operating system and to copy files from there to your host. It doesn’t matter where your backups come from so you can use Instant Restore with backups from your on premise VMs, physical machines or Azure VMs. All you need to do is backup your VMs using Azure Backup. Sounds easy? It definitely is!
If you have a respective backup you either open your Recovery Services Vault and browse through the backup items or you select your VM in the Virtual machines blade and select the backup option.
Then select the File Recovery (preview) option on the upper right side. In the pane that opens select the recovery point you want to restore files from and click on the Download executable button.
What’s happening now is that a PowerShell scripts starts that connects to the recovery point you chose before using the iSCSI service and that mounts all of the volumes the recovery point contains to your local file system.
In my demo it’s the E:\ drive that has been mounted.
Now I can access any file and folder in drive E:\ which is the mounted recovery point and copy it everywhere I want to. It cost me about 5 minutes to have a new backup of my Azure demo VM triggered and to recover files from the recovery point to the Windows machine of my choice. Azure Backup Instant Restore will definitely be part of the BCDR concepts me and my colleagues will offer to and plan for our customers as of now.
Just give it try – I’m sure you’ll love it as well. If you have any comments or questions on that feel free to contact me.
That’s all for now.
Bye,
Tom
Azure and beyond 
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