Configure Azure files

3. Troubleshoot Azure File Sync

So one of the requirements of this exam is to be able to troubleshoot Azure file sync. There is an article on the MicrosoftDocs website called "Troubleshooting Azure file sync." I strongly advise you to read it, or at least skim through it. There are also articles on Azure files for Windows and Azure files for Linux. So one of the strongest points, I think, I'll pull out of this entire article for you, is that when you're having issues with Azure Filesync, let's say the synchronisation isn't happening, or it's delayed, or the files are missing, or something's just not working the way you expect. Should you recreate and remove the server endpoint? Remember when we were looking at the file syncs? We've got the sync groups, which are the groups of files being synchronised amongst many servers, and then there's the registered servers, which are the server endpoints. Should you remove it and recreate it? And the answer that Microsoft wants you to know is no. No. Removing a server endpoint is not like rebooting a server. And they've even used an exclamation point.

So that is a strong point that they want you to know. It's never an appropriate solution to fix any issues. Do not go into the servers and start deleting stuff. If it's not synchronising properly, it's really worth it to go in and turn on some of the logging. So, for instance, if the installation is not going well, you can turn on more verbose logging so you can see what the causes are, etc. So I would definitely recommend that you look at this article if you are having actual trouble with file sync. Start to go down through here and look at some of the solutions that are being able to reset the list of registered servers, if you're not seeing the server that you're expecting, etc. But deleting the server and restarting it is pretty extreme. Azure is doing a lot of work behind the scenes to synchronise your files, a lot of data being moved and a lot of steps to that. So removing it's not just a simple refresh. It should not be the first solution. So go check the article and there will be some really good tips for how to troubleshoot this. Yeah

Implement backup and recovery

1. Azure Backup

So in the last couple of sections, we've been talking about storage accounts and now we're talking about Azure hails and file synchronization. Now we want to talk about something that's very important that we all know is important. That is backups. Now we obviously want to know that our servers and our server environments have backups of our Azure VMs. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to do backups. And even our files can be backed up in a way. So I'm going to start off by going back to my home. And the place where backups are stored is called a Recovery Services Vault. This is back-up recovery within the marketplace, but it is a Recovery Services Vault. When you create, it's not going to hit the button. We have to give it a name. Is it SJD's new recovery services vault? I'm going to put that in my pay as you go subscription. We can create a new resource group or put our existing resource groups. Now the location is extremely important. We cannot just accept a location that we feel like the backup. Our backup location has to be in the same room as our Azure resources.

So if you have resources in the eastern region, you're going to create a backup vault in the eastern region. Now if you have resources in multiple regions, then you're going to have to create a Recovery Services Vault in each of them in order for the backups to be So you're going to end up creating one RecoveryServices fault for each region in which you have files, VMs, or SQL Server in a virtual machine. So I'm going to create this in the Journey US region because I know I have got a file server in that region. All right, so that was created very quickly. Now, if I go to the resource, I can see this is called a Recovery Services Vault. And the recovery services vault has a couple of misses within Azure. One of them is backup, which is what we're talking about, and the other is what's called site recovery or site replication. Now, we haven't talked about the site recovery yet, but the biggest site recovery is that you're going to take a server and it's going to replicate that into the Recovery Services Vault.

And if a disaster was to happen, if that server was to go down, you could restore that recovery into a new region and then have it up and running within ten to 15 minutes. So recovery services are sort of like disaster recovery. whereas a backup has other purposes. You might need backups for governance purposes, right? You need backups for that particular server that might go down. And you want to be able to quickly find many different reasons why you want to have backups. Let's start by going into the backup dashboard here. We're going to create our first backup. You start your backup with a goal. Azure backups run either on Azure resources or on-premises resources. There is a service software that you can download from Microsoft's Download Center and install on your personal computer or on your servers. And it will basically take your data and your files from that server, compress them into a container and put them into backup.

And if you ever need to restore the whole thing or individual files, you can use the Azure Recovery service to get that. But let's talk about Azure System Start and what kinds of Azure services can be backed up. Well, as of now, you can back up a Virtual Machine or you can back up an Azure Fileshare or SQL Server in a VM. So let's choose Azure file share because we just created one and are going to click backup. So after a few seconds to find it, it did find my Azschd files storage account, so we're going to choose that one. In essence, it says "register storage account with Recovery Services vault." This might take a minute, so let us give it a minute. So it successfully registered my Azet SGTfiles storage account as a synchronisation target. Let's choose our camp files, which is our only file share that we have. Now, there's this concept backup policy. We are sort of forced to create a new policy unless we have one that's already existing. Now, The backup policy is basically the schedule, and maybe we want to set this up so it backs it up daily. So let's say Azid's new policy.

At this point, we only have the daily options. We can choose the time and the time zone in which that time is interpreted. And we can choose how long the backup is retained for without having to leave the defaults. And so this is ready to go. If we want to, we can enable backup. And what that will do is it will backup our Azurefile storage every day for 30 days and keep 30 days' worth. So we can go back in time to at any point yesterday, the day before, five days ago, 20 days ago, et cetera. So we closed that out. And if we go into the backup protected itemsbackup section right now, it hasn't, so we can see there are no backups that have been done. We're going to have to let that one go. We're going to have to let that one run, obviously. Now, it didn't take long. We only had the one in our Azure Files account. And so we can see here that we've got one item backed up from our Azure file service. Okay, so that's worked. If we go into the back of infrastructure and we go down into storage accounts, we can see that Azzd Files are protected and there's one item protected from that storage account. So that's how we back up. We can do the same thing for virtual, meaning SQL Server in a VM.

2. File Recovery from a VM Backup

Now, we saw that you can backup a storage account. You can obviously back up a virtual machine as well. I'm on a virtual machine here. If you go under operations, you'll see there's a backup section. And this is where you would enable your Race Services Vault in the same way that we just created it for the storage account. Now in this virtual machine, I've already enabled the recovery services vault. I set a backup policy. So it's going to run every day at around 07:30 p.m. In this particular policy, But I also triggered the backup manually. I set it back up a little while ago, and the backup has been created. Now, I want to show you that it's possible to then recover files from these backups. So let's say you have a file that has been corrupted, changed, or deleted, and you want to go to a previous backup. And all you need to do is just pull out that single file. There is a file recovery option. You go into File Recovery, and you get to select which backup point that you want. I'm going to choose the latest backup. Now, in this particular case, there is a download that you can download. It's an executable, and it will actually mount the Recovery Services Vault and allow you access to the files inside the backup. And so you can run this, let's say, you can run it on the VM where the backup occurred. And then you can go in there and you'll be able to see it has a mounted disk. You'll see, it says the drives are mounted for 12 hours in this particular executable. So you do have some time to recover the files. So I could log into the VM, download this executable, and then mount the disk. And once you're done with it, you'll be back here. And then, let's say you grab the file you need from there and click Mount.

3. On-Premises Backup

So we just saw how we can back up our Azure file share into a backup vault. What about our on-premises resources? So if I use the on premises option, I'm going to get a whole number. There are actually eight different sources that Microsoft can use to back up our on premises machine. Starting with the simplest option, the files and folders option, we're going to see. Microsoft is recommending that we download the agent, the basic recovery services agent, to our local machine and install it on the server that we want the files to be backed up from. And once we get the vault credentials, we can register those agents into this particular Recovery Services vault, set it up as a schedule and choose the files and folders that need to be backed up. And basically, it will run every day, every hour. However, we set that up as our schedule to backup those files and folders into the recovery fault. That's like the simplest case. This is a piece of software that runs on your PC. And it doesn't really run separate from it; it just runs on top of it. If we wanted to back up the bare metal, like basically everything from below the operating system upwards, okay, then we're going to have to use what's called a backup server. This is an external product. We're going to download this other piece of software. It's not an agent. And we're going to set that up on its own server, or at least on a separate server. And then that's going to be able to do the backups of the other servers right down to every byte on the hard disk. Whatever more intensive type of backup you choose, you'll find that if we take any of these others, like HyperV, it's also going to require the backup server. We wanted to back up our SQL Server instances. The data itself is also going to run a backup server. Okay, and this software backup can handle other kinds of workloads, but it's a bit overkill for just five. So yes, Azure can serve as the back-up storage for your on-premises machine servers, even your home. You can be used as a backup source.

Prepared by Top Experts, the top IT Trainers ensure that when it comes to your IT exam prep and you can count on ExamSnap Microsoft Azure Administrator certification video training course that goes in line with the corresponding Microsoft AZ-104 exam dumps, study guide, and practice test questions & answers.