multiple apps backup in azure

Question

I'm configuring backups for multiple app services in azure for my business. This link says that I have to put the backups in a storage account. I was wondering if I it is okay in practice to put all app service backups in one storage account or if I should have a backup storage account for each app service that I have.

Answer 1

You can face two potential situations, although the latter is unlikely to happen.

1) You lost your files. For some reason it was deleted, corrupted or you just need to roll back to a previous point in time. In this case, backup to Storage is the best way to go. I'm assuming the content of your website is dynamic, that is, you have more than just the source code to backup - like end-user uploaded files. If you don't have any end-user data, I don't see the point of backing up the source code. Just use Git or any other version control instead.

2) You need to keep backups (user data) for a long period of time because of legal requirements. In this case, consider using a GRS Storage account for additional protection. This keeps your data safe at a replica in a secondary location. If anything happens to the primary region and a recovery is not possible, Microsoft will failover the Storage account for you.

Said that, assuming you need to keep backups in a Storage account, I'd suggest 1 Storage Account for all your apps to keep management easier. If you have too many Apps (like in the range of few dozens to a hundred), consider a few more to avoid performance issues because of so many writes/reads into a single storage account.

Also, make sure to think about the backup strategy for your databases as well. If using SQL Azure DBs, it will have backups built-in into the service, but as per 2), if there's a legal requirement to keep user data for longer, you need to enable long-term retention to a storage account as well manually.