Azure Backup - Set Storage Redundancy for Recovery Services Vault

When you create a Recovery Services Vault in Azure, the default for the Storage Redundancy now is "Geo-redundant". Earlier this was not a customizable setting and was default to Locally-redundant. As a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy it makes sense to have Backup as Geo-redundant. This will ensure that the backup will be replicated to a secondary paired region. In the event of disaster level event if the primary region goes down then you will have access to the data in the secondary region.

You can find which is the secondary paired region based on the region where you have deployed the resources by referring the table in this link: Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR): Azure Paired Regions

Where to update configurations

To update the redundancy settings:

1. Navigate to the recovery services vault and click on the Properties under Settings
2. Then click on the "Update" link under the Backup Configuration
3. In the Backup Configurations blade, the setting for redundancy is the first one and is available under the "Storage replication type"

Note: This setting can not be changed if you have any item being protected in the vault. You will only be able to modify if you don't have anything protected.

By default, the data that is replicated to the secondary region is available to restore in the secondary region only if Azure declares a disaster in the primary region. But now you can also control the cross-region restore (CRR) yourself. We will look at that feature in the next blog post that you can access here: Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup