In this post, I’ll outline the main differences between these two services to help you decide which one best fits your needs — or whether using both makes sense in your environment.
Recovery Services Vault
The Recovery Services Vault is the traditional storage location for Azure Backup data. Until recently, if you were backing up virtual machines — whether hosted in Azure or on-premises — you would use a Recovery Services Vault. This vault is also leveraged by Azure Site Recovery for disk replication in disaster recovery and migration scenarios, but here we’ll focus strictly on backup functionality.
For VM backups, the vault operates at a regional level and includes configuration settings that apply per vault. These settings include replication options such as LRS, ZRS, and GRS, along with encryption choices based on your requirements. You can define separate backup policies for different workloads, including enhanced policies that support newer Azure capabilities like Trusted Launch VMs, Ultra SSDs, shared disks, and multiple backups per day.
From a technical perspective, Azure Backup protects virtual machines by first taking a full backup. After that (excluding SQL Server backups), it performs incremental backups.
Pricing consists of a fixed monthly charge per protected instance for the Azure Backup service itself, in addition to storage costs. Storage charges cover the initial full backup and all incremental backups retained according to your policy, which can support up to 9,999 recovery points.
This vault supports both short-term and long-term retention scenarios. A recent enhancement allows long-term backups to be moved to an archive storage tier, helping reduce storage expenses.
In addition, the Recovery Services Vault can provide application-consistent backups for various workloads — including Windows, Linux, and SQL Server — by utilizing VSS writers or custom pre- and post-backup scripts.
Azure Backup Vault
The Backup Vault is designed to store backups for newer Azure workloads supported by Azure Backup, such as Azure managed disks, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Database for PostgreSQL. It is not intended to replace the Recovery Services Vault but rather to complement it.
Like the Recovery Services Vault, each Backup Vault is region-specific and includes per-vault configuration settings for resiliency and encryption.
However, this vault does not perform full, application-consistent virtual machine backups. Instead, it offers protection for Azure managed disks. Backups are crash-consistent and include both OS and data disks, achieved by creating incremental disk snapshots at scheduled intervals — as frequently as once per hour.
A key distinction is that backup data is not copied into long-term vault storage. Instead, Backup Vault provides an operational backup solution based on disk snapshots. You are billed only for the incremental (delta) changes stored in snapshot storage, and there is no additional backup service fee. By default, snapshots are stored on Standard HDD storage to minimize costs.
Currently, each disk can have up to 200 snapshots, with a maximum of 180 snapshots per backup policy. This limitation directly affects how long backups can be retained. For example, hourly backups (24 per day) would allow for roughly seven days of retention. If backups are taken daily, the maximum retention would be 180 days.
Key Differences Compared to Recovery Services Vault
• Designed primarily for short-term, operational backups
• Supports more frequent disk backups — up to once per hour
• No dependency on a backup agent and no performance impact on the VM during backup
• Provides crash-consistent backups only
• Allows you to back up specific disks rather than the entire VM
• Charges apply only to incremental snapshot storage on Standard HDD — no backup service fee
• On-demand backup and restore operations are significantly faster than vault-based transfers
• Restore operations create new disks only (no option to overwrite existing disks)
• Uses managed identities for authentication during backup and restore processes
As you can see, these two services differ significantly in functionality and use cases. The right choice depends on your workload requirements. In many scenarios, a combination of both Recovery Services Vault and Backup Vault may provide the most comprehensive and cost-effective backup strategy.
