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Backing Up Azure Resources

On March 20th, 2023 we will be updating the Azure hands-on labs in the Data Engineering Using Microsoft Azure Nanodegree program. This update will delete all progress in the labs throughout the Nanodegree and unfortunately, due to changing our hands-on lab provider, we will not be able to restore any work lost due to this update. We recommend you save your files and work on your local machine for these exercises. You can then upload those files to the new hands-on labs and continue your work.


Azure SQL Server | SQL Database

Courses: “Cloud Data Warehouses with Azure” and “Data Pipelines with Azure” 

  • After pushing the updates to your classroom, we will terminate your current lab environment and spin up a new one in a different Azure tenant. You won't be able to access two Azure tenants at any given point in time, so there is no way to take the backup of your Azure Database across tenants or to an Azure Backup Recovery Services vault in this case.
  • However, a workaround is to copy an Azure SQL Database to a local database or any target server either by using the Copy Database Wizard or copy using the Azure portal.
  • If nothing works, you must recreate your database from the ground up.

Azure Synapse Analytics

Courses: “Cloud Data Warehouses with Azure” and “Data Pipelines with Azure” 

  • You must copy all your SQL queries and SQL scripts from the Data section of your synapse analytics workspace to a notepad on your local machine. After we push the updates to your classroom on the designated date, you must perform the following steps in the synapse analytics workspace as part of your P2 project:
    • Link to the data from the Azure database or Azure blob storage,
    • Ingest data from Azure database to blob storage.
    • Create the staging or external tables.

Azure Databricks workspace

Course: “Data lakes and Lakehouses with Spark and Azure Databricks”

  • You must export all your Databricks notebooks to your local using these instructions in the iPython format. Once the update has been performed, you can import the notebooks back into your new lab environment.