I am reading some guides to see how to backup/restore a Microsoft Azure SQL Server database.

Searching Microsoft documentation, it seems that:

Azure SQL Database has automated backups, so Azure Data Studio doesn't perform Azure SQL Database backup and restore. For more information, see Learn about automatic SQL Database backups.

After further reading, I see we can indeed restore a DB by creating a replica of it at a previous time point, but this costs ~80 euros if I read it correctly, as it basically creates a second instance of the db. Also, It seems to be able to go back in time only some limited time.

Is there a cost-less (without incurring additional cost to the existing costs) way to create a "permanent" off line copy of the database and restore it to an Azure SQL Database?

The first part of this question is similar to

Here is a simple way to export DB as Bacpac, you can similarly use the [Import Bacpac] Operation to restore.

I am Connected to Microsoft SQL Server, backing up a SQL DB. But you can do this connecting to on-premise SQL server too.

CodePudding user response：

What's the actual objective?

You can restore an Azure SQL to a point in time. Go into the Azure portal and do it in there. (Azure Data Studio may not have a nice way for you to do this)

By offline do you mean an on-premises (non cloud) copy? again what is the objective? Is it disaster recovery? Your on premises copy is more likely to be lost than the Azure one.

You can also point in time restore to another Azure database. If your DB <2Gb then you can just retore to the basic edition which is 4.25 Euro a month. Or you can use the serverless option which is even cheaper

But you have to consider why you are doing this. Azure has a lot of redundancy already built in which makes these kinds of manual offline copies and processes unecessary.