Azure Recovery Vault Services SQL restore to another subscription?

Question

We run two Azure subscription - Prod and non-Prod. Within each subscription, we have Recovery Vault Services which undertake both VM and SQL backups.

We have a requirement to regularly restore our Prod SQL databases and use them in the non-Prod environment.

The issue we have is that it appears that there is complete separation between the vaults - and we cannot find a way in which to restore directly to the non-Prod SQL servers.

We thought about restoring to file in the Prod subscription then copying across to non-Prod however this is incredibly slow.

I expect we are not the first to have this issue?

One thought I had was to create a dedicated restore VM in the non-Prod subscription with a shared disk. I'd then add it to the Prod Recovery Vault Services as 'on-premise'. The Restore would take place to the shared disk that would then be added to the non-Prod server.

Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Hi @a8ree1 Sorry for the delay in response to your query.

Since Azure Backup uses the Recovery Services Vault (RSV), which is scoped to a subscription, cross-subscription backup and restore is not currently supported.

Not being a Data SME, could you use the native SQL backup functionality, write that file to a drive/folder, and perform a file-level backup. Then, with the file recovery script process, mount that recovery point to the non-Prod VM, to obtain the .bak file.

Or, another option could be to use Azure Files/Azure File Sync as a file server, which may allow access to the same content across Prod/Non-Prod.

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Answer 2

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-sql-restore-cli?source=recommendations#cross-subscription-restore

The above answer is no longer correct if it ever was.
This is the link to a page that shows how to make a Cross Subscription restore.
You can either Cross Subscription or Cross Region restore but you can not restore from a subscription in one region to a Different on in another region.