I run a bunch of Azure SQL Server databases, and they are backed up internally in Azure to storage. This is great for most cases.
However, to mitigate risk (if for example, we lose access to the azure account), I would really like to back it up to something external, where I have an actual, physical .bak file or .bacpac file.
Something simple like to onedrive, dropbox or google drive would be fine.
Do any solutions exist for something like that?
Unfortunately nothing out-of-the-box from Azure will do that. However, there are 3rd party solutions such as SQL Backup and FTP which works great and is cheap. Alternatively, you can take a look at Azure Automation which allows you to run and schedule powershell scripts such as this one to automate the databases export to an Azure Blob then use Rclone, an open-source tool to synchronize the Azure Blob storage to any other cloud storage provider.
You can export the Azure SQL Database directly to a local drive on your computer by scheduling the following command on your computer:
SqlPackage /Action:Export /SourceServerName:SampleSQLServer.sample.net,1433 /SourceDatabaseName:SampleDatabase /TargetFile:"F:\Temp\SampleDatabase.bacpac"
Where F is a local disk drive.
For more information about how to use SqlPackage please read this article.
