back to article Azure promises to keep your backups safe and snug for up to 10 years

Microsoft continued its drive to encourage SQL Server customers to move their precious data to its cloudy towers with the announcement that long-term retention and automatic failover had finally hit the big time. Long Term Retention The preview, announced back in October 2016, was designed to extend the retention period of …

  1. Wellyboot Silver badge

    New storage term inbound?

    Given the storage growth over time will Yottabytes cover this by 2028 and is 2028 the year when MS announce they will simply keep everything forever instead of starting to weed out the old stuff?

  2. 0laf

    This is MS though innit. Your Stuff will be safe with us for up to 10yr, or 6 months if we change chief exec and they'd rather sell moon-pies or run a streaming media company than an IT service provider with booring storage.

    In which case we'll give you 4 weeks notice to move your shit and no refunds bro.

    Remember, Zune, Windows Phone (7, 8, 10), ME, Vista, Win8, RT, W10 upgrade-gate, Cortana, Skype....

    1. TheVogon

      I think you are confusing Microsoft with Google.

  3. Aodhhan

    Marketing

    Of course they say this... the longer you keep your data with them, the more money they make.

    It's not like they say... they'll do it for free.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Apples to oranges comparison

    AWS RDS's high-availability failover between availability zones (AZs) isn't the same thing as geo-replication and failover between regions - it's all within a region. AWS has multiple AZs within each region and you're right, it's trivial (and a good thing) to replicate and failover between them. Azure is moving to a similar AZ model but has already had update domains and fault domains for a while which kinda-sorta gives you the same features, and which automatically give you similar within-region high availability for SQL Azure. Neither cloud had a super-simple, check-a-box cross-region high availability and failover capability, but Azure is now talking about its failover groups and active geo-replication features, which do give you genuine cross-region failover which is what you need for enterprise-level high availability.

    It's important to know the difference between AZs and regions - some people seem to think that single region use of multiple AZs is all they need; for many purposes it probably isn't.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Up to

      Don't be daft, it means you can choose any retention period up to 10 years. This is a little bit different than consumer-level service offerings like £20/month ISP deals or free Dropbox.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ah...offsite backups.....

    I wonder if M$ and their Azure customers are thinking about TESTING A RESTORE!

    *

    Maybe doing a full restore during their annual disaster recovery test?

    *

    Good idea.....and lots more fees for a complete, duplicate environment during the test.

    *

    How many "all-in-cloud" customers are actually even contemplating such a thing?

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