Data Protection Overview for Azure Files

Here’s a concise summary of the Azure Files data protection overview article.

• Purpose

  • Describes tools and concepts to protect Azure Files (storage accounts, file shares, and data) and to back up and restore file shares.

• Applies to

  • Compatibility matrix for management model, billing model, media tier, redundancy, and protocol (SMB/NFS) as shown in the article.

• Why protect your data

  • Recover from accidental deletion/corruption

  • Restore after failed upgrades

  • Ransomware protection

  • Meet long-term retention and compliance needs

  • Ensure business continuity for critical workloads

• Back up and restore Azure file shares

  • Azure Backup can be used to back up file shares via the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, or REST API.

    • Portal, PowerShell, CLI, REST links are in the article.

  • Related how-to articles (back up, restore, manage) are referenced for portal, PowerShell, CLI, and REST.

• Data redundancy

  • Multiple redundancy options (including geo-redundancy) are available; choose based on use case. See Azure Files data redundancy.

  • Important: Geo-redundancy (GRS/GZRS) is supported only for HDD file shares; SSD file shares must use LRS or ZRS.

• Disaster recovery and failover

  • Customer-managed failover is available for HDD file shares to fail over to a secondary region.

  • System snapshots are maintained in the secondary region to provide recovery points; planned failover can lead to a stale or NULL Last Sync Time (LST) until snapshots or user activity create new recovery points.

  • To trigger snapshot creation and refresh LST for each share: mount the share and open any file for reading or upload a test file.

  • See Disaster recovery and failover for Azure Files.

• Prevent accidental deletion of storage accounts and file shares

  • Storage account locks

    • CannotDelete: prevents deleting the account but allows modifications.

    • ReadOnly: prevents deleting or modifying the account.

    • See Apply an Azure Resource Manager lock to a storage account.

  • Storage account recovery

    • Recover a deleted storage account if deleted within 14 days, was ARM-created, the name hasn’t been reused, and the recovering user has required RBAC permission. See Recover a deleted storage account.

  • Soft delete for file shares

    • When enabled, deleted shares go to a soft-deleted state and can be restored until retention expires; billing continues for used capacity. See Enable/Prevent links in the article.

• Share snapshots

  • Point-in-time snapshots (manual or via Azure Backup). Up to 200 snapshots per share.

  • Snapshots are incremental; billed on differential storage, making multiple recovery points cost-efficient.

  • See Overview of share snapshots for Azure Files.

• Use Azure File Sync for hybrid cloud backups

  • Azure File Sync + Azure Backup supports hybrid backups from on-premises file servers to Azure file shares.

  • Enables single-file or full-share restore, and centralizes/syncs files. Architecture diagram is included in the article.

• See also

  • Links to Azure Files redundancy and Azure Files disaster recovery and failover.

Last updated: 09/19/2025

If you want, I can produce a shorter executive summary, a checklist of recommended protections, or convert the backup/restore methods into a step-by-step guide. Which would you prefer?