Backup Azure Debian VM

Question

I have a few questions concerning Azure. At this moment I created a VHD image pre-installed with all my software so I can easily redo the same server. All this works perfectly but the next thing i'm working on are the backups.

There is a lot of stuff on the web concerning this but non involve Linux (or I cant find them). There are a few options as I read.

The first option is to create a snapshot and store it in the blob storage. Next thing is HOW? I installed the azure CLI tools via NPM but how to use them? Nothing on the web on how to use them on the command line.

The second thing is to store a ZIP file as blob data. So I can manually manage the backups instead of a complete snapshop. I don't know if this is better or less good but the same goes out for this. How does it work?

I hope someone can pinpoint me in the right direction because I am stuck at this point. As you might know, backups are essential for this to work so without them I can't use Azure.

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Thanks for your answer but I am still not able to do this.

root@DEBIAN:/backup# curl https://mystore01.blob.core.windows.net/backup/myblob?comp=snapshot
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Error><Code>UnsupportedHttpVerb</Code><Message>The resource doesn't support specified Http Verb.
RequestId:09d3323f-73ff-4f7a-9fa2-dc4e219faadf
Time:2013-11-02T11:59:08.9116736Z</Message></Error>root"DEBIAN:/backup# curl https://mystore01.blob.core.windows.net/backup/myblob?comp=snapshot -i
HTTP/1.1 405 The resource doesn't support specified Http Verb.
Allow: PUT
Content-Length: 237
Content-Type: application/xml
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0
x-ms-request-id: f9cad24e-4935-46e1-bcfe-a268b9c0107b
Date: Sat, 02 Nov 2013 11:59:18 GMT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><Error><Code>UnsupportedHttpVerb</Code><Message>The resource doesn't support specified Http Verb.
RequestId:f9cad24e-4935-46e1-bcfe-a268b9c0107b
Time:2013-11-02T11:59:19.8100533Z</Message></Error>root@HSTOP40-WEB01:/backup# ^C

Hope you can help me get it working since the documentation on Azure + Linux is very bad

Answer 1

I don't believe snapshots are implemented in the CLI. You can either work with the REST API for snapshotting directly, or use one of the language SDKs that wrap this functionality (such as Node.js createBlobSnapshot()).

Note that snapshots are point-in-time lists of committed blocks/pages. They're not actual bit-for-bit copies (yet they represent the exact contents of a blob at the moment you take the snapshot). You can then copy the snapshot to a new blob if you want and do anything you want with it (spin up a new vm, whatever). You can even do a blob-copy to a storage account in a separate data center, if you're looking at a DR strategy.

Snapshots will initially take up very little space. If you start modifying the blocks or pages in a blob, then the snapshot starts growing (as there needs to be blocks/pages representing the original content). You can take unlimited snapshots, but you should consider purging them over time.

If you needed to restore your VM image to a particular point in time, you can copy any one of your snapshots to a new blob (or overwrite the original blob) and restart your VM based on the newly-copied vhd.

You can store anything you want in a blob, including zip files. Not sure what the exact question is on that, but just create a zip and upload it to a blob.