Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Power Apps give businesses the confidence to use data in a structured, consolidated way to engage customers in a meaningful manner — all while optimizing business metrics through AI generated algorithms. While this is great for increasing the rate of business innovation, it gives rise to another concern – the need for organizations to protect and maintain the integrity of their data.
A key way to accomplish this is with a backup and recovery tool. Maintaining regular backups allow you to restore your database to a point in time within a given retention period.
To support their users, Microsoft offers two primary options for backup and recovery. The first option is a free, built-in backup and recovery option. A second pay-as-you-go option is also made available–this ‘copy to storage’ model is optional and requires configuration. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at both options.
Built-in backup and recovery option
Microsoft's native, built-in backup and recovery option can be found in Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC) and is where the backup retention policies apply. Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data will remain forever in the live systems. As storage is consumed and limits are reached, customers will eventually need to buy more Dataverse storage for a fee.
Backups that are automatically run on the Dataverse database are limited in their respective retention policies – 28 days for production and seven days for sandbox environments. This built-in backup option is always available to customers and does not require any effort to deploy. There are also no additional costs associated with the storage of backups and there is no limit to the amount of backups that can be initiated simultaneously.
Dynamics CRM offers automated and manual backups of cloud data. SQL Managed Instance (Microsoft’s fully managed instance hosted in Azure) uses Azure SQL Database to create full backups, differential backups, and transaction log backups:
- A full backup is configured to write a complete copy of the database to a storage structure. Full backups are often scheduled to run on a weekly basis.
- Between each full backup, differential backups capture changes made since the previous full backup completed. Differential backups are often scheduled to run on a daily basis.
- Between each differential backup, transaction logs are backed up at frequent intervals to capture every change made to the database. Transaction log backups are often scheduled to run every 15 minutes or less.
Pay-as-you-go option
The pay-as-you-go backup and recovery model is known as Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse. This solution requires you to integrate your paid for Azure storage resources like Azure Synapse and Azure Data Lake, while incorporating an internally managed project to deploy it for each environment. A project like this can typically take several weeks or months to finish.
Historically, this service was known as “Export to Data Lake”, and before that, it was called “Project Athena”. Subsequently, a configurable option (different binaries) for D365 customers from prior years included a feature called “Data Export Service (DES).” It leveraged the native Azure SQL features of change tracking to capture data change events and feed them in near-real-time to a customer’s paid-for external Azure SQL storage container. Since Microsoft announced that DES is being deprecated as of November 2022, many customers using DES are migrating to Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse.
In September 2022, with April Release Wave 1 new features, the current feature of Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse will begin offering the ability to restore records. This will be the first time the feature will be able to restore records, so it will effectively be a version one effort by Microsoft compared to our many years of customer driven requirements across many thousands of customers actively using the feature.
A third option: protect your data with Own
At Own, we help you keep your data safe and uphold your part of the shared responsibility model. Our market-leading backup and recovery solution, Own Recover, is currently available for both Microsoft Power Apps and Dynamics CRM customers.
Contact us to learn more about protecting your SaaS data or schedule a customized 1:1 demo below.
