Azure File Recovery.
The use case for Azure file recovery is something like
you get a very urgent phone call,
text message, or email from your manager or another
stakeholder who says something like,
can you please restore that script I accidentally deleted
from the Azure file server VM? Yes,
being called into action not to restore an entire VM,
not to swap out all of its storage,
but just to find a singleton file or folder resource.
This use case is primary for Azure file recovery.
Okay,
let's go over the Azure file recovery workflow step by step. You're going to
choose which recovery point you want to bring into scope.
This would hopefully contain the file system artifact that you need to restore.
Of course, it goes without saying,
but I'm going to say it anyway, that you're not going to
be able to grab a resource from a backup snapshot unless
it's actually been backed up.
That is if you're doing your snapshots at 3 AM,
someone creates a file at 4 AM, someone else deletes it at 11
AM and you're asked to recover it at noon,
that's not going to work.
Okay, so what we do specifically in the next step depends upon whether
you're trying to recover assets from a Windows or Linux VM in Azure.
If your backup snapshot is from Windows,
you'll download an executable. If you're recovering a Linux Azure VM,
it'll be a Python script. And you'll unlock those scripts with a
one‑time password that the Azure portal generates. The executable
actually unpacks a PowerShell script.
The Python script just does its work.
But either way, whether you're dealing with the Python or the PowerShell script,
those resources will mount all of the disks from the backup snapshot.
And remember, that's going to be one and only one operating system disks and
zero or more data disks that are there in this backup. The magic that takes
place here is the iSCSI client on your machine.
That would be in Windows the iSCSI initiator.
The script actually taps in using iSCSI to create a mount.
So the long story short is the disks from your backup snapshot
appear to be local volumes on your system, and you have 12
hours to recover files from them.
You can literally use the command prompt or the mouse
drag‑and‑drop to do that recovery.
And then when you're finished, either you can let the 12 hours elapse or
you can do an unmount operation from the Azure portal.
Now you should know that Microsoft very heavily throttles this
connection. It's not meant for you to recover multi‑gigabyte files
like database backups and stuff like that.
Azure file recovery is meant for you to just grab, like I said, an
accidentally deleted document or script file,
something like that that's relatively small, but would be way
too time intensive for you to do say a disk restore just to get
a few files from that snapshot. So it has its place, but Microsoft has put controls in place to prevent abuse.