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Azure Backup Times Dramatically Improved

MichaelB-2136 290 Reputation points
2026-06-03T09:00:52.8266667+00:00

Hi, I have a recovery services vault that backs up two storage account file shares. Since inception these jobs have taken between 4-9 hours a night, even though not much data changes every day.

Since 1st June my backup job for both have dropped to around 1 hour.

1 - The file count/data in both storage account has not changed dramatically, just slight increase as per normal usage

2 - The snapshot and move to vault stages both have green ticks like usual

3 - The data transferred in the backup jobs is the same as before too. As I said, at times a job that has data transferred at 7MB would take 6 hours which was surprising to me

Everything is fine and these backups times seem a lot more reasonable I just wanted to check if there have been recent Azure improvements that explain this. My vault/storage account is UK South.

Azure Backup
Azure Backup

An Azure backup service that provides built-in management at scale.

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  1. Suchitra Suregaunkar 14,425 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
    2026-06-03T19:16:37.8266667+00:00

    Hi @MichaelB-2136 ,

    Thank you for sharing the details and glad to hear your backup times have improved significantly.

    Azure Backup for Azure File Shares uses a snapshot-based incremental backup mechanism. When a scheduled backup runs, the service takes a share-level snapshot and then identifies the changes (delta) since the previous snapshot to transfer data to the vault. The overall backup duration depends not just on data transferred, but also on the file enumeration and change-tracking process the service performs internally across the entire file share.

    Azure continuously rolls out backend optimizations to improve service performance across regions. While there is no specific public announcement on the What's new in Azure Backup page regarding a file share backup speed improvement as of now, Azure regularly deploys service-side enhancements that can reduce backup job duration particularly around how the service enumerates files and processes incremental changes.

    Since your backups are completing successfully with both the snapshot and vault transfer stages showing green ticks, and the data transferred remains consistent, this confirms the backup behavior is healthy and working as expected.

    Here are a few things you can check for further confirmation:

    • Azure Service Health — Navigate to Azure portal → Service Health → Health History for your UK South region to see if any service advisory or improvement was posted around 1st June.
    • Azure Updates — Check https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/ for any region-specific backend changes.

    For reference, here are the official Microsoft documentation links related to Azure Files backup:

    No action is needed on your end , the improvement is a positive change.

    Hope this helps! Please let us know if you have any further questions.

    Thanks,

    Suchitra.

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