General Availability: Instant File Recovery for Microsoft Azure VM Backups

Last week Microsoft announced the General Availability (GA) of a new Microsoft Azure feature that has been in preview recently.

Instant File Recovery allows Azure Virtual Machine (VM) users to retrieve folders and files from their Azure VM backups, both Windows and Linux based, for use on other devices and systems.

After receiving feedback from customers in the preview and enhancing the features for an improved customer experience, security, and performance the team decided to ship the feature for all Azure users.

This capability brings two key features:

-- Recover files instantly – Now instantly recover files from the cloud backups of Azure VMs without any additional infrastructure. Whether it’s accidental file deletion or simply validating the backup, instant restore drastically reduces the time to recover your data.

-- Open application files without restoring them - Our iSCSI-based approach allows you to open/mount application files directly from cloud recovery points to application instances. You need not restore the entire VM and thus save on time taken for recovery and consumption of bandwidth. For e.g. in case of backup of a Azure Linux VM running MongoDB, you can mount BSON data dumps from the cloud recovery point and quickly validate the backup or retrieve individual items such as tables without having to download the entire data dump.

For more information on Instant File Recovery you can check out the Azure Backup File Restore documentation.

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