ephemeral disk backup and restore azure

Question

Can we take backup of ephemeral disk using azure backup. We facing issue with ephemeral disk , is there any restriction with ephimeral disk and what is the process of it's restore

Answer 1

Hello @Azure-learning Thank you for contacting us through Microsoft Q&A platform. Happy to assist!

It looks like you have requirement to backup ephemeral disk using azure backup. Currently, Azure backup does not support backup of ephemeral disk and there is no workaround that am aware of which is recommended for this scenario.

Document reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ephemeral-os-disks#unsupported-features

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Answer 2

As mentioned "Ephemeral OS disks are created on the local virtual machine (VM) storage and not saved to the remote Azure Storage. Ephemeral OS disks work well for stateless workloads, where applications are tolerant of individual VM failures but are more affected by VM deployment time or reimaging of individual VM instances. With Ephemeral OS disk, you get lower read/write latency to the OS disk and faster VM reimage."

Ephemeral disks - work great for low latency application and services like - Azure Virtual Desktop that get build and provisioned when needed, then deleted when not needed.

But they aren't stored into the Azure storage layer - and any data on them is lost, if the VM gets shutdown - or migrated to another host.

If you are using Ephemeral disks - make sure that the data that you need to save - is stored either on Azure Files, or another VM - to get backed up (ie user profiles, documents etc).

Because of these restrictions - Ephemeral is faster and free (as its only taking up local space on the host and not replicated across availability zones etc) - but take care when using them.