Azure managed instance database manual backup

Question

Hi We are planing to configure azure managed instance with few user databases in production system. We need to get manual backup and restore in to non production managed instance periodically .

Q1. can we run manual backup on Managed instance databases ?(We understand it has azure automated backups ).
Q2. if not able to do that, then in what solution we could do that? (Azure SQl database has so much limitations like no elastic job (private access) not supported ) that is not our preferred option
Q3. Can we configure Always AG access DR in Managed instance databases with group listener read only access- secondary site , read write primary site ?

many thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can perform backup to URL to later restore on another Managed Instance.

BACKUP DATABASE [XXXXXXX]  
TO URL = 'https://XXXXXX.blob.core.windows.net/XXXXX/XXXX_20200424.bak'  
WITH COPY_ONLY  
  
RESTORE DATABASE [XXXXXX] FROM URL='https://XXXXX.blob.core.windows.net/XXXX/XXX_backup_2021_01_29_130404.bak'   

You can also use Azure CLI.

az account set --subscription "Enter Subscription ID"  


az sql midb restore -g Source_Resource_group --mi Source_instance_name   
  
-n Source_database_name   --dest-name Destination_database_name  
  
 --time "2022-11-09T11:30:00" --dest-mi Dest_instance_name   
  
--dest-resource-group dest_resource_group