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Setting up an account

With Afi Backup for Microsoft Azure, you can configure periodic backups of your Microsoft Azure virtual machines in a few easy steps.

Info

Afi plans to extend Azure infrastructure support in the next product updates, including Azure Database and Azure cloud configuration backup and recovery.

Create an Afi account

Please follow the Afi onboarding guide to set up your Afi account. After an account is created and your Microsoft Azure tenant is added, you can proceed with protecting virtual machines and running your first backups.

Protect resources

To start protecting your data, go to the Service → Protection screen and choose virtual machines which you want to back up and their protection policies (SLAs). A protection policy defines what Microsoft Azure data will be backed up, how often backups are scheduled, and how long backup data is retained.

Afi Backup for Microsoft Azure provides several pre-defined backup policies that you can use right away or modify/create new policies:

After that, you can assign protection policies to all resources in the Microsoft Azure tenant or select specific Azure resource groups to be protected.

Assign SLA to a specific resource

Assign SLA to an Azure resource group

Afi discovers management group, subscription, and resource group hierarchy for Azure tenants, enabling backup SLA mass-management for the discovered groups.

Assigning multiple SLA policies to a resource

For Microsoft Azure tenants, you can create multiple independent backup sequences for a resource (e.g., a virtual machine) by protecting it multiple times using different backup SLA policies (e.g., Gold and Silver). This approach enables you to back up resource data to multiple backup storage locations in different regions (coming in H1 2025).

Please note that each backup sequence is linked to its corresponding backup SLA policy. If you assign a new backup SLA to a resource and initiate a backup, it will create a new backup sequence from scratch.

Backup

When using protection SLA policies with a periodic backup schedule (for example, the default Bronze, Silver, and Gold policies), backups are performed automatically according to the schedule defined in the corresponding SLA policies. Afi displays the time of the next scheduled backup on the Service → Protection tab for each protected resource. With the Manual backup schedule (for example, the default Manual policy), backups are not performed automatically and should instead be triggered manually.

Run backup

You can trigger a backup for a resource manually on the Protection screen or click the Backup all now button on the Overview screen to initiate backups for all protected resources in the tenant.

Monitor backup progress

You can monitor the backup status on the Service → Protection screen (see the progress wheel in the Status column) or on the Activity → Tasks screen:

To simplify progress monitoring, you can filter tasks with In Progress status on the Activity → Tasks tab:

After a backup is completed, you can access the backup data by clicking the Recover button for the corresponding resource and policy on the Service → Protection screen.

Data browsing and preview

Inside the virtual machine backup, you can browse its configuration, data volumes, and volume content.

Currently, volume content browsing is supported only for static (fixed) partition schemes and partitions with EXT4 and NTFS file systems. Dynamic partition layouts, such as LVM (Logical Volume Manager) for Linux and LDM (Logical Disk Manager) for Windows, are not supported.

Configuration download

You can copy or download Azure-compatible JSON configuration for a virtual machine, as well as for its disks, network interfaces, and public IP addresses, from the backup browse view.

Data download

For EXT4 or NTFS volumes where content browsing is supported, Afi allows you to download a selected file from the volume browse view. To do it, please select a file to download and press the Download button:

Data restore

You can restore a virtual machine from a backup snapshot, creating a new virtual machine with the same or custom configuration. If the original virtual machine still exists in Azure, it won't be affected by the recovery.

To restore a virtual machine:

  • Click Recover in the virtual machine backup browse view to open the recovery dialog.
  • Enter a name for the virtual machine to be restored.
  • (Optional) Modify the configuration for the virtual machine. The following options are available:
    • Azure subscription ID, resource group, and location
    • Subnet ID and security group ID for each network interface
    • Remove or assign the public IP address
    • Disk encryption settings for each disk
  • Click Recover to initiate the virtual machine recovery.

You can track recovery progress on the Activity → Tasks tab, and Afi will notify you via email once the recovery is complete.