On October 13th, 2022; Microsoft announced the public preview of Enhanced soft delete for Azure backup.
Well, soft delete is already a very useful feature in the Recovery service vault as if someone deletes the backup intentionally (malicious intent) or accidentally, the backup is preserved for 14 days by default (can be increased up to 180 days). Basically, the backup is stored in a “soft delete” state.
Enhanced soft delete provides the following additional data protection capabilities:
Always-on soft delete:
Deleted items will be preserved for the specified soft delete retention period and will be permanently destroyed post-expiration of the soft delete retention period.
Once this is turned on, this can’t be reversed for the recovery vault.
Soft deletion retention is now configurable:
So, the default is 14 days but now the soft deletion retention period can be increased to 180 days. There will be additional charges incurred beyond 14 days. Please click here to know about the pricing.
Re-registration of soft deleted items:
Items in the soft deleted state can be registered in another vault but the same item can’t be registered with two vaults for active backups.
Soft-delete and re-registration of backup containers:
If all backup items in a container are deleted; the container can be unregistered so it can be registered in another vault.
Soft-delete across workloads:
This is applicable to all vaulted workloads and support for Backup and Recovery services vaults. Operational tier workloads such as Azure files backup, Blob operational backup, and Disk & VM backups.
Supported Regions
- West Central US
- North Europe
- Australia East
Next Steps:
Click here to configure and manage enhanced soft delete (preview) if you are in one of the supported regions.
References:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-backup-enhanced-soft-delete-preview
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-in/azure/backup/backup-azure-enhanced-soft-delete-about
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-in/azure/backup/backup-azure-enhanced-soft-delete-configure-manage?tabs=recovery-services-vault
