Mine your Azure backup data, it could save you 💰💡

Your data has a story to tell. Mine it, decipher it, and turn it into actionable outcomes. 📊🔍

Azure backups can become orphaned in several ways (I'll dive into that in a future post). But here’s a key point: orphaned doesn’t always mean useless, hence the word “Potential” in the title of my Power BI report.

Each workload needs to be assessed individually. If a backup is no longer needed, you might be paying for it - unnecessarily and unknowingly. 🕵️‍♂️💸

To uncover these hidden costs, I combined data from the Azure Business Continuity Center with a PowerShell script I wrote to extract LastBackupTime and other metadata. This forms the foundation of my report, helping visualize and track backup usage over time.

This approach helped me identify forgotten one-time backups, VMs deleted without stopping the backup, workloads excluded due to policy changes, and backups left behind after resource migrations. If you delete unneeded backups and have soft-delete enabled, the backup size drops to zero and Azure stops charging for it. ✅🧹

💡 Do your Azure backups have their own untold story to tell?

📸 Here's a snapshot of my report that helped me uncover these insights 👇