Before you can start to protect your Microsoft Azure Stack appliance, there are a number of things that you need to consider and plan for. You need an SMB 3.x file share that is accessible from Microsoft Azure Stack, and this may mean that you need to modify your edge firewall to allow infrastructure backup. Typically, an outbound connection to either the IP address or the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the target file server is all that is required on port 445.

You also need to size your backup repository according to your needs. Microsoft recommends that you carry out an infrastructure backup at least twice a day (that is, every 12 hours), although this backup can be configured to occur every 4 hours minimum, and Microsoft further recommends that you keep no more than 7 days' worth of backups online. Again this is configurable, with the minimum retention period being 2 days and the maximum retention period being 14 days.

Each backup payload is projected to be around 10 GB in size and so the total space requirements, following those guidelines for every 12 hours with a retention period of 7 days, is around 140 GB.