title: Creating an effective Azure VM Backup Strategy
body: <p>I am trying to understand how to do a backup all of my stuff on Azure VM/Role </p>
  
  <p>For example I have a VM and I have installed and configured various stuff like a streaming server via remote desktop.<br>
  Now what happens if for some reason the VM needs to restart, hardware failure is one example for a need to reboot. What happens, do I need to re-install all my stuff?
  So I don't get it, MS <a href="https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/legal/sla/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SLA</a> guarantee 99.9% up-time for the VM, does this resolve to 0.01% chance of me doing the re-install? I think that the real chance me do the re-install is 100% sooner or later.</p>
  
  <p>On AWS you can backup the EC2 to ESB or S3, you install all the stuff, take a snapshot and if the EC2 goes down, the snapshot is restored.</p>
  
  <p>Here I found a post about how Azure doesn't support this, but it is from 1 year ago and I wonder if this has changed, but can't find any info.
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5791947/backup-snapshot-a-vm-image-vhd-in-windows-azure">backup/snapshot a vm image (vhd) in windows azure</a></p>
  
  <p>In the management portal I see a lame button called [reimage], but what it does is quite different from what the name implies.</p>
  
  <p><em>If this is still not possible, I fell that this will be a deal breaker and I will have to ditch Azure in favor of a mature solution from AWS</em></p>