In a previous post, I talked about some of the available storage options that can be used to back up your databases directly to the cloud. Doing this is a really good way to get your backups off-site and replicated in a single motion, depending on the region and redundancy option select, for minimal cost.
So how do you back up to URL, the cloud? I’ll show you. Before we start, this assumes that you have a storage account in Azure setup and configured. If not, go do that first and then come back. You will also need SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 or higher in order to make this work. You will need SQL Server 2016 or higher if you want to backup to block blobs.