Category: Office 365

Have you ever run into an issue where you need to export a backup of an Azure vm? No? Just me? Okay, well It can be a pain because there is no native way to just get the VHD of the backup file. If you want to restore a backup point, it’s no problem. If you want to clone a machine, no problem! Export a backup that you have already taken, well now that is a lot of work!

The trouble is due to how managed disks work in Azure. Since I am running machines with managed disks, when you restore the backup it retains that format and is only in a format that can be used by Azure. You may have noticed that if you ever pull up Azure file explorer you can’t see any of your vm’s disks, so to get around that you have to convert your managed disks to VHD and copy them to a new storage account.

Here is the hard thing, there is no way in the GUI to do this you have to use power shell if you want to get this to work. Lucky for you here is how you can do it without coming up with another option.

1st go into your Azure backups and restore a backup point. Here you want to create a new restore disk. Make sure to select the

2nd create a new blob you want to copy the VHD exports to. Once created you will need to determine the storage account Name, Container Name, and keys for the blob you plan on using.

You can find most of this info in your storage account.

3rd connect to your Azure environment via power shell.

At this point we need to identify the name or names of the restored disks we want to convert or export.

Use the following script to identify there name based on their creation date.

Connect-AzureRmAccount
get-azurermdisk | sort-object -property timecreated | ft name, TimeCreated

Finally we just need to put it all together and we can export these to our blob and then use storage explorer to download the files.

$disks = 'Disk1','Disk2'
$resourcegroup = 'enter the managed disk resource group name'

foreach ( $diskname in $disks){
$diskname
Get-AzureRmDisk -DiskName $diskname -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroup
$SAS = Grant-AzureRmDiskAccess -DiskName $diskname -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroup -DurationInSecond 58600 -Access Read
# Get the destination details
$storageAccountName = "##theNameof yourBlob##"
$storageContainerName = "##vhd##"
$destinationVHDFileName = $diskname
$storageAccountKey = "##yourkey##"
$destinationContext = New-AzureStorageContext –StorageAccountName $storageAccountName -StorageAccountKey $storageAccountKey
$sas.AccessSAS
# copy the vhd
Start-AzureStorageBlobCopy -AbsoluteUri $sas.AccessSAS -DestContainer $storageContainerName -DestContext $destinationContext -DestBlob $destinationVHDFileName
}

If you are in a time crunch you can monitor the status of the export by using the following code.

foreach ( $diskname in $disks){
$status = Get-AzureStorageBlobCopyState -Blob $destinationVHDFileName -Container $storageContainerName -Context $destinationContext
$percentage = $status.BytesCopied/$status.TotalBytes*100
$percentage = "{0:N2}" -f $percentage
Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "$percentage completed!"
}