Continuous mode backup and restore - Episode 14

In this episode, Mark meets up with Govind Kanshi to talk about the backup and restore features in Azure Cosmos DB.

Deleted an account? Modified or deleted data from a container? Want a copy of data in another region? Azure Cosmos DB's new continuous backup mode covers you end to end.

## Chapters

00:01:56 - Opening
00:05:00 - Continuous backup with point-in-time restore (Preview)
00:13:06 - Online backup and on-demand data restore
00:18:00 - Demo: Backup policy
00:24:55 - Configure and manage continuous backup and point in time restore (Preview)
00:30:22 - What's the RBAC story for continuous backup?

#AzureCosmosDB #database #NoSQL

[hidename-gjxi]

Please clarify if this is true or not - Periodic Backups: The restore points for periodic backups are typically at the time when each backup was taken. For example, if you have periodic backups taken every four hours, the restore points would correspond to those specific backup timestamps. When you perform a point-in-time restore using periodic backups, you can choose a specific restore point based on the backup timestamps. It's important to note that if you restore to a specific backup, you may lose the changes made between that backup and the next backup in the sequence.

Continuous Backups: Continuous backups in Cosmos DB capture changes in near real-time, often on a per-second basis. The restore points for continuous backups are much more granular compared to periodic backups. With continuous backups enabled, you can choose a specific point in time down to the second within the retention period for the backups. This means you have the ability to restore your database to any precise moment within the available restore points.

To summarize, periodic backups offer restore points based on the timestamps of the backups themselves, typically taken at fixed intervals. Continuous backups, on the other hand, provide much finer-grained restore points, capturing changes at a per-second level, allowing for more precise point-in-time restores.

[prakashhulamani]

How to restore the backedup data, because after providing the cosmosbackupoperator and cosmosrestoreoperator permission to resource group but still I am not seeing the restore option enebled for resource group.

How to provide proper access to cosmos account or individual account to restore the data because we dont have permission to provide the access to subscription level.

[mrjamiebowman]

I just wish we could get "OUR" data and maintain data offline. This would also be useful for CI pipelines. We would like to completely tear down our DEV environment nightly using Terraform and re-create it with our nightly backups. This is important because when we are doing DEV work we want to use the same exact tier as our PROD environment but it doesn't make sense to leave it up and running when we aren't using it or after we've moved on to another project. The only part of this process I can't get to work is Azure Cosmos DB backup/restore because I can't access the backups or use the Data Migration Tool (can't run on Linux) b/c that project has been abandoned.

[subhadipghosh]

Is there a way to update the backup policy in an existing cosmos db? It seems the support doesn't exist. If so will this be ever supported?