Enhanced data protection for Azure Files

Microsoft

Nov 03, 2026

Organizations rely on Azure Files for business-critical workloads such as VDI, SAP, and general-purpose file shares that hold their enterprise data. For these workloads, backup and disaster recovery are day-one requirements. Customers need a simple, scalable way to recover from an accidental change to production data, a regional disruption or a ransomware attack, both within a region and across regions.

Today, we’re announcing new capabilities, in Public Preview, that expand business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) capabilities for Azure Files. They help customers recover from operational issues, strengthen regional resilience and protect critical file data from cyber threats:

Vaulted backup for NFS shares: Protect NFS file shares with isolated recovery points through Azure Backup for protected, trusted recovery from cyber incidents.
Revert snapshot: Roll an existing file share back to a known-good point in time, in place, without changing the endpoint or mount path for fast. This gives you fast recovery from operational issues.
Azure Files-to-Azure Files copy and sync with Storage Mover: Use Azure Storage Mover to maintain a secondary copy of your SMB file share data in the Azure region of your choice, with scheduled incremental transfers to keep it current for disaster recovery.

Together, these capabilities let customers build Azure Files resiliency in layers: roll back quickly, maintain secondary copies and recover from protected backups.

Vaulted backup for Azure Files NFS shares

Cyber recovery introduces another dimension to resiliency: When ransomware or another security incident compromises the production environment, organizations need protected recovery points and may need to validate recovered data before reconnecting it to production. Azure Files already supports vaulted backup for SMB shares. With this preview, that protection extends to NFS shares.

Vaulted backup for Azure Files NFS shares adds an additional protection layer through Azure Backup. Recovery points are maintained separately from the production file share and managed through backup policies designed to support long-term retention, immutability, and cyber recovery objectives. Vaulted backup helps customers protect critical file data when:

Recovery points need protection separate from production: Maintain protected recovery points separately from the production file share, adding another layer of protection for critical file data.
Backup strategies require immutability: Support immutable backup strategies as part of the broader approach to protecting recovery points and meeting cyber recovery objectives.
Data must be retained long term: Manage recovery points through backup policies designed to support long-term retention and meet the organization’s retention requirements.
Ransomware resilience is a priority: Strengthen resilience with protected recovery points for recovery when ransomware or another security incident compromises the production environment.

To participate in the Vaulted backup for NFS shares preview, sign up here.

Roll back quickly with Revert snapshot

Operational mistakes are among the most common reasons applications need data recovery. A deployment can modify the wrong files, a configuration rollout can affect an entire namespace, or an administrator can accidentally overwrite critical content.

Azure Files Revert Snapshot initially provides in-place recovery for data and applications hosted on SMB file shares, with NFS support coming next. Customers can select a point-in-time snapshot and restore the existing file share to that state while applications continue using the same file share, endpoint, and mount path. Common scenarios include:

Failed application deployments: Roll back after a deployment modifies the wrong files.
Incorrect configuration changes: Restore the share after a configuration rollout affects the namespace.
Accidental mass modifications: Return to a point-in-time snapshot after unintended changes or overwrites.
Development and test environment resets: Reset the file share to a selected snapshot.

Azure Backup offers an integrated experience in the Azure portal restore blade to revert snapshots it manages.

To participate in the Revert Snapshot preview, sign up here.

Azure Files-to-Azure Files copy and sync with Storage Mover

From disaster readiness and regional expansion to workload relocation and storage consolidation, customers need a simple, scalable way to copy and sync file data across storage accounts and Azure regions. Common use cases include Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) users maintaining secondary copies of FSLogix profiles and user data to support regional continuity, SAP and enterprise applications moving application data during regional expansion, organizations consolidating distributed content to simplify administration, and AI workflows placing datasets closer to AI and analytics compute to support distributed development and processing.

Azure Files-to-Azure Files copy and synchronization with Azure Storage Mover gives customers a fully managed Azure service to copy data between SMB file shares across storage accounts, regions, and subscriptions (within the same tenant). They can also schedule incremental transfers to keep destination shares up to date.
Customers can:

Maintain secondary copies for business-critical workloads to an Azure region of choice. Schedule incremental synchronization of application data, user profiles, and shared content to another Azure region, helping organizations strengthen business-continuity and recovery planning.
Copy or migrate file share data between regions: Copy data for regional expansion, datacenter transitions, or workload relocation.
Consolidate file shares: Bring data together across storage accounts and regions to simplify management.
Operate at scale with less overhead: Centrally schedule, monitor, and audit transfers instead of maintaining scripts or copy infrastructure.

Azure Storage Mover reduces operational overhead with centralized scheduling, monitoring, auditing, metadata preservation, and orchestration for recurring file transfers.

Figure: Storage Mover (West Central US) copies File share 1 in East US to File share 2 in West Central US.

Preview support for Azure Files to Azure Files data copy is now available for SMB shares, with NFS support coming soon.
To participate in the preview program, sign up here.

Together, these capabilities help customers protect critical file data, recover quickly from operational issues and strengthen continuity across regions. Vaulted backup for NFS shares, Revert Snapshot and Azure Files copy and synchronization with Storage Mover provide complementary layers for a more resilient BCDR strategy.