azure backup and site recovery vault

Question

My question is related to Azure-Azure scenario.

I see we can create Azure Backup and Site Recovery to use the same Recovery service vault. I understand that for ASR the Recovery vault should be on the DR site so all snapshots are available for restore during DR situations.

Since we would use Azure Backup Service primarily for day to day restore needs (non-DR) I was wondering if it would make more sense to separate out the Recovery service vault used by Backup from the one used by ASR and instantiate the former into the primary location? This is because otherwise this would be adding dependency on DR region availability which doesn't make sense as under normal operation it would be a pity if we cannot restore stuff on primary because DR region is unavailable. Are there any best practices in this area?

Extending the question a bit more, if we have ASR setup is there anyway we can use its backups to recover/restore individual VMs/files during normal operations (non-DR). If possible then we wouldn't need a separate backup service.

Answer 1

by nature of the set of scenarios each service provides protection, backup is suited to be in the same location as VM whereas DR should always be to a location which is different from the source VM. And also to serve the needs differently, they use different technologies to save data - DR uses log shipping for a less RPO and egress scenario where as backup relies on snapshot mechanism as keeping data for long term is the goal here typically.