FAQs

Will your backup services incur other costs during backup?

It varies depending upon the backup services. Generally, if you only use the Microsoft Entra ID service and Admin Portal Settings service, you will not experience additional costs for backup.

If your subscription contains Azure VM or Azure Storage, your backup services may incur additional costs on the protected Azure VM and Storage instance for data transfer, snapshots, operations, or API calls, etc. For details, refer to the table below:


Service	Additional Costs	Pricing Reference
Azure VM	Snapshots The cost could be higher if you perform more backups and keeps more snapshots.	For the snapshots pricing, refer to this Microsoft page.
	Data transfer The cost will increase if the data is transferred out of the region where the Azure VMs reside or out of Azure, especially if you are using different storage types.	For details, refer to this Microsoft page: Bandwidth pricing.
	Index generation for exporting VM files The cost will increase if the Azure VMs to protect are in a region different from where your IBM® Storage Protect for Cloud is signed up for. Additionally, if the data is stored in a storage type other than Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, the expenses will also rise.
Azure Storage	Read operations and Data retrieval for backup	For details, refer to the following Microsoft pages: Azure Blob Storage pricing Azure Files pricing
Azure SQL	There will be additional costs if you use the Azure SQL backup service. To minimize the impact on production environment databases during Azure SQL backup jobs, the database data is copied to a temporary database before the backup process begins. This approach may incur additional costs.	For details, refer to Azure SQL Database pricing.

How does the retention policy work for Azure VM backups?

The backup process for Azure includes saving snapshots to Microsoft Azure and storing the backup data to your storage location. Snapshots are required to ensure data consistency and enable faster recovery process.

When configuring backup scopes for Azure virtual machines, you can configure the retention policy to set when to prune the snapshots from Azure and the backup data from the storage location.

- Snapshots in Azure – You can configure the number of snapshots to keep or how long the snapshots will be retained.
- Backup data in storage – You can configure the retention period for daily, hourly, and weekly recovery points.

For details on how to configure the retention policy for Azure VMs, refer to Create a New Backup Scope for Azure VM.