Can Windows Azure Backup support a bare-metal restore? (So many questions. So little time. Part 52.)

Recently we’ve been showing off a capability (currently in preview) called “Windows Azure Backup”, which is a simple file system backup and restore to/from Windows Azure storage. 

At our IT Camp in Saint Louis a few weeks back, David asked:

“Can Windows Azure Backup do a bare metal restore in the event of total failure of a physical server?”

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: Not directly, no.  But consider this…

You have other tools such as Windows Server Backup and System Center 2012 SP1 Data Protection Manager that can do a full system, system state, or even bare-metal image restore of a backed up machine. 

With Window Server Backup, you could use a two-step process of additionally saving the WSB-created image up to Windows Azure storage using Windows Azure Backup.  And the restore would be to retrieve the image using WAB and then recover it.

With Data Protection Manager, the new functionality to store your backup data into Windows Azure already exists as of System Center 2012.

“So I can just put my image backup into Azure, right?”

No.  DPM only supports Volume, SQL DB, and Hyper-V Guest backups to Azure.  So, in the same two-step process we discussed for Windows Server Backup, you could do your bare metal backup to a file share and then use DPM to protect that share to Windows Azure.