Can a given backup container contain multiple backup items?

Question

I'm entering into the world of trying to manage my Azure backups via Powershell using the Az* cmdlets. I understand the hierarchy for backups are as follows:

Recovery Vaults -> Backup Containers -> Backup Items -> Recovery Points

I see there's only one backup container for a given vm, but there's also just a single backup item per each of my containers. Then the backup items have multiple recovery points.

Are there cases where there can be multiple backup items for a given backup container or is it always a 1:1 mapping? I'm trying to decide if I need to enumerate through $backupItems, but won't need to do so if it's only ever one for each VM. If so, what scenario would multiple backup items occur?

Answer 1

Hi McDonald, Matthew,

Thank you for posting in the Q&A Forums.

Relationship between backup containers and backup items

Backup Container: In Azure Backup, a backup container is a logical container used to organize backup items together. For Azure VM backups, each VM is usually treated as a separate backup container (although in practice they may share the same Azure Backup Recovery Service repository), but the concept of a “backup container” here is more about logically distinguishing between different types of backup items (e.g. Azure VMs, SQL databases, Azure file shares, etc.).

Backup Item: A backup item is a specific instance of a resource to be backed up. For Azure VM backups, each VM exists as a separate backup item. This means that if you have three VMs, you will have three separate backup items, each associated to its own VM.

Special cases

While in most cases the backup item for each Azure VM is unique, there are theoretical situations where a backup container can contain multiple backup items, especially if the backup item is not just an Azure VM. However, in the context of Azure VM backups, this is not common.

Whether you need to enumerate $backupItems

If your scenario is limited to Azure VM backups and you confirm that there is only one backup item per VM (which is often the case), then logically you probably don't need to explicitly enumerate $backupItems because you can locate and manage the backups of the VMs directly through their identifiers or configurations.

However, if your scripts or automated processes need to handle multiple types of backup items (not just Azure VMs), or if you need to verify that there is indeed only one backup item under a certain backup container, then enumerating $backupItems might be a good idea. Doing so adds robustness and flexibility to the code, making it easier to scale if you need to support more types of backup items in the future.

In most cases, for Azure VM backups, you can assume that each backup container (which is actually a specific VM in the Azure Backup Recovery Service vault) contains only one backup item. However, it's always a good habit to write scripts or automated processes that can handle multiple scenarios and backup types.

Best regards

NeuviJ

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