Restore from Long-Term Storage

Backup for Windows supports restore from any of the supported storage classes and storage tiers. Besides, there are some limitations to this. Especially, these limitations concern the following backup types:

• Image-based backup
• Virtual machine (VMware and Hyper-V) backups
• MS SQL backup
• MS Exchange backup.

When restoring big amounts of data, keep in mind that in some cases a lifecycle policy can be set in such a way that some parts of backup contents can be in long-term storage tiers which cause several limitations for the restore job, such as:

• Lingering retrieval time of a backup content (depends on storage provider). Thus, the restore plan that requires data retrieval from the cold storage classes can take up to 48 hours (for AWS Glacier Deep Archive storage class)
• Retrieval costs. Basically, the data retrieval operations are not free and can be costly depending on the retrieval type and the amount of data to be restored.

Refer to the following links to learn more about retrieval pricing.

Storage Provider	Link
Amazon S3	https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/
Microsoft Azure	https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/
Google Cloud	https://cloud.netapp.com/blog/gcp-cvo-blg-google-cloud-storage-pricing-get-the-best-bang-for-your-buckets

Thus, it is not recommended to use the long-term storage for backup data that is used for disaster recovery restore plans or any other goals that require quick and affordable restores.