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What's supported

Afi SaaS backup for Microsoft Azure provides comprehensive protection for Azure virtual machines and databases, including configuration and data.

Virtual machines

Virtual machine types supported for backup

  • Windows and Linux virtual machines that support Azure restore point technology (both powered on or shut down)
  • Azure Generation 1 and Azure Generation 2 virtual machines
  • Virtual machines of standard and trusted launch security types
  • Virtual machines with disks encrypted by Azure Key Vault
  • Virtual machines with Premium v2 SSD and Ultra SSD disks
  • Windows virtual machines that use BitLocker for OS and data disk encryption

Backup of virtual machines with ephemeral or shared disks is not supported at the moment (support is planned for Q4 2025).

Virtual machine properties supported for recovery

Upon a recovery, Afi fully preserves the original virtual machine configuration (by default), allowing you to recover the virtual machine to a custom resource group and location, as well as to override certain properties, if specified.

Currently, the following custom restore parameters are supported:

  • Subscription and resource group
  • Location
  • Subnet and security group configuration for the virtual machine's network interfaces
  • Encryption settings for the virtual machine's disks

Volume configurations supported for content preview

Volume content browsing and data download are supported for both static (fixed) and dynamic LVM partition schemes, as well as for partitions formatted with EXT4, XFS, or NTFS file systems.

For LVM partition layout, only linear volumes are available for browsing. Striped and mirrored volumes are currently unsupported for volume content browsing, although support for these volumes is planned in upcoming service updates.

Limitations

Volume content browsing is not supported for:

  • Striped and mirrored LVM (Logical Volume Manager) layouts for Linux and LDM (Logical Disk Manager) for Windows
  • Windows volumes encrypted by BitLocker

Databases

Afi provides backup and recovery for Azure SQL databases and Azure PostgreSQL servers, with support for Azure MySQL databases planned for upcoming product updates. Afi database backup captures the database’s configuration, schema, and data, and delivers full-fidelity recovery as well as table-level data export as CSV. The backup implementation guarantees strong consistency at the database level.

Azure SQL

Afi Azure SQL backup supports both server-level and database-level (Transparent Data Encryption) encryption configurations.

All current Azure SQL service tiers in both the vCore and DTU deployment models are fully covered:

During a database backup, Afi automatically provisions a staging SQL server, clones the database into that server, and then uploads the data to the Afi cloud. Backups created this way are transactionally consistent. The staging server's service tier is chosen based on the source database’s tier, the server is provisioned temporarily and is removed when the backup completes.

To access the staging server upon a backup and the restore destination server upon a recovery, Afi configures granular firewall rules for the server so that our backup service can connect to the server and query or recover the data. After recovery finishes, the corresponding firewall rule is removed automatically. For backups, the staging server itself is deleted once the backup is complete.

Azure PostgreSQL

Afi supports backup and recovery for Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible servers running PostgreSQL version 14 and later.

During a PostgreSQL server backup or recovery, Afi configures a temporary firewall on the server that allows our backup service to connect to the server and query or recover the data. This rule is created only for the duration of the operation and removed when it completes. To connect to the server, Afi adds a service principal as a PostgreSQL server administrator and enables Azure Entra ID authentication for the server if it hasn't already been configured.