title: Windows Server Backup and Microsoft Azure Backup
body: <p>Since Azure agent doesn't support full VM image backups directly through the portal (without shutting down the VM first), I wanted to schedule a regular bare metal backup of my Azure VMs using Windows Server Backup together with the Azure Backup agent. </p>
  
  <p>The challenge is to find a temporary place to store the files created by WSB while Azure Backup agent transfers them to the Azure backup store. I first thought the VM temporary disk ( D:\ ) would be suitable, but it turns out that on some VMs the temp disk is smaller than the OS disk and would thus not have enough space.</p>
  
  <p>An option is of course to attach one extra 127 GB disk to each VM and use that as a destination volume for WSB backups and use Azure backup agent to backup that volume, but this would incur significant extra storage charges, since you would pay for both the extra disks storage and the backup storage.</p>
  
  <p>The best thing would of course be if the functionality of Azure backup agent was built into Windows Server backup, but this is not the case, unfortunately.</p>