Skip to main content

Automated Backup - Windows Azure Web Sites

By
We have a new feature available for Windows Azure Web Sites – we can create backups automatically of our site and database that can be used later on.
To be able to use this feature, you will need to change the web site mode from free to standard. Only for standard web sites this feature is available. When you are in the standard mode you have multiple instance sizes and you can scale your site automatically.
From the cost perspective you should know that there are no additional cost to it (automatically backup feature). You only pay the space used by the backup on the storage. This is a nice think, we have another nice service that is free.
When we activate the automated backup feature we will need to specify the storage account where we want to make the backup and what is the frequency. In this moment we can specify only in days the frequency, but I don’t see this a real problem. In normal cases, you don’t want to make a backup every 5 minutes. Beside this, you can specify the time when the backup is made. In general we prefer to make the backup during the night, but based on your client location, night can mean 03:00 UTC or 14:00 UTC.
A nice feature available is the ability to include not only the site but the database that is used by your site. In general, the most important information can be found in the database. This is the place where data is changing very offer and you don’t want to lose it.
Any database that is linked to your site can be backup. What is nice is that you can create a backup for not only SQL but also for MySQL.
Once you configure all this, the last thing that you need to do is to hit “Save” button. And wait, we have something more. You can trigger the backup manually. To use manual backup feature you don’t need to activate the automated backup, you only need to configure what is backup and where.
The most complicated step is the restoring (or not). From the same tab we can navigate to the restore action that give us the ability to restore the web site and database from our storage account or from a file that is on another storage account.
I would recommend this feature especially for the database backup and how easily you can restore your web site. Please be aware, don’t use this feature if you write in the web site directory pictures or data uploaded by the clients. In this case you should store the data directly to Windows Azure Storage Blobs.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to audit an Azure Cosmos DB

By
In this post, we will talk about how we can audit an Azure Cosmos DB database. Before jumping into the problem let us define the business requirement: As an Administrator I want to be able to audit all changes that were done to specific collection inside my Azure Cosmos DB. The requirement is simple, but can be a little tricky to implement fully. First of all when you are using Azure Cosmos DB or any other storage solution there are 99% odds that you’ll have more than one system that writes data to it. This means that you have or not have control on the systems that are doing any create/update/delete operations. Solution 1: Diagnostic Logs Cosmos DB allows us activate diagnostics logs and stream the output a storage account for achieving to other systems like Event Hub or Log Analytics. This would allow us to have information related to who, when, what, response code and how the access operation to our Cosmos DB was done. Beside this there is a field that specifies what was th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Can User Technical Profile Influence AI Architecture Decisions?

By
In the last few days, I ran a small experiment on Devin/Windsurf/Cascade, BMAD, and LLM-based architecture decisions. The initial concern was simple: if an AI coding assistant knows something about the user, for example, that the user is a Java developer or a .NET developer, can this information influence the architecture and technology stack that the AI will propose? This question is important because many companies are starting to use AI tools not only for coding but also for product discovery, architecture, documentation, and technical decision-making. If the AI is influenced by the developer's personal profile, the result may not be fully neutral. It may look like a business or architecture decision, but in reality, it may be partially shaped by the context of the person using the tool. The test was done using BMAD with Devin/Windsurf/Cascade. The scenario was a unified field service operations platform. The task was to let BMAD refine the product, define the architecture and s...
Post a Comment
Read more

ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded

By
Today blog post will be started with the following error when running DB tests on the CI machine: threw exception: System.InvalidOperationException: The Entity Framework provider type 'System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer' registered in the application config file for the ADO.NET provider with invariant name 'System.Data.SqlClient' could not be loaded. Make sure that the assembly-qualified name is used and that the assembly is available to the running application. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=260882 for more information. at System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.DependencyResolution.ProviderServicesFactory.GetInstance(String providerTypeName, String providerInvariantName) This error happened only on the Continuous Integration machine. On the devs machines, everything has fine. The classic problem – on my machine it’s working. The CI has the following configuration: TeamCity .NET 4.51 EF 6.0.2 VS2013 It see...
8 comments
Read more