Azure Tip: Easily find all your datasources that have not been configured for backup in the Azure Portal

These days you can backup a lot of Azure and even on-premises resources with Azure Backup, like Azure VMs running Windows or Linux and Azure Files.

However, “did we backup our data?“, is a question you still hear a lot, if data is damaged or a system or service failure occurs.

If you are interested, you can find a complete list of all resources you can backup with Azure Backup on this Microsoft Docs page.

There are already some different ways you can govern and control your cloud backup estate to ensure that all your resources are compliant from a backup perspective. For example, you can assign Azure Policies for backup, which enables and/or configures Azure Backup whenever a new resource is deployed. Or you can enable Backup Reports which will help you to gain insights in your current backups.

But even then, from time to time it is advised or even necessary to check if all required resources (datasources) are backed up or to identify the ones that are currently not protected. Luckily there is an easy and quick way to find this out trough the Azure Portal with the use of Azure Backup Center, which I will show you in this blog post.

Azure Portal

Logon to the Azure Portal and type in “Backup center” in the Global search bar. Then click on Backup center.

In the Backup center screen (blade), select the Protectable Datasources menu item under Policy and compliance.

You can then filter the list by Datasource type, which allows you to view all your datasources from a specific type that have not been configured for backup. Like you can see in the screenshots below as an example Azure Disks is selected, which shows all Azure Disks currently not configured for backup.

Next to filtering by Datasource type, you can also filter by Datasource subscription, resource group, location and tags.

Keep in mind that if you select Azure Files (Azure Storage) as the datasource type, the Protectable Datasources view displays the list of all storage accounts, even those that support file shares and without any files shares configured at the moment.

If you then identified a datasource that needs to be backed up, you can simply right-click on the three ellipsis on the right hand side of the screen (…) and select Backup to configure backup for the resource.

Hope this this can help you and comes in handy!