Memory hook: Backup restores a point; replication supports failover; neither is proven until tested.
Must remember
- Recovery Services vaults and Backup vaults support different workload/protection scenarios. Select the vault type, Region, redundancy and policy supported by the resource. A vault existing does not mean a backup is configured or healthy.
- Backup policies control schedule/retention; backup instances/items and recovery points show actual protection. App-consistent recovery requires supported coordination. Soft delete and immutability settings can protect backups but also affect deletion and retention obligations.
- Restore to the intended location or an isolated validation environment as supported. Check encryption-key access, identity permissions, networking, data consistency and application startup. Monitor job failures, missing recovery points and restore results, not just policy assignments.
- Site Recovery replicates supported workloads for disaster recovery. Recovery plans coordinate sequencing and automation. A test failover validates a separate test environment; planned and unplanned failover have different source availability and data-loss implications.
- RPO measures tolerable lost data/time; RTO measures time to useful service. Replication lag, application dependencies, DNS, certificates, secrets and capacity all affect the measured result. Failback needs reverse protection/synchronisation and deliberate traffic control.
- Keep recovery responsibilities documented, practise drills and review costs for replicas, snapshots, storage and reserved recovery capacity. Replication can preserve infrastructure availability while still copying logical corruption.
Choose under exam pressure
| Requirement | Choice and reason |
|---|---|
| Recover data before an accidental deletion | A suitable retained backup/recovery point. |
| Move a supported workload to a DR Region during outage | Site Recovery failover with a tested recovery plan. |
| Validate DR without disrupting production | Test failover in an isolated network. |
Traps
- Replication is not historical backup.
- A successful backup job does not measure restore time.
- A vault lock/immutability policy must match retention and deletion requirements.
Active recall
1. What does RPO limit?
Acceptable data loss expressed as a time or recovery-point requirement.
2. What does RTO include beyond booting VMs?
Dependencies, access, routing and verification that the application is useful.
3. Why isolate a test failover network?
To avoid duplicate production identities, conflicting writes and unintended client traffic.
4. Why can a restore fail despite a retained recovery point?
Missing keys, permissions, unsupported target configuration or resource capacity can block it.
5. What makes failback a separate operation?
Data and replication direction must be reconciled before safely returning traffic.