Microsoft Fabric disaster recovery

DR is not the same as backup. Backup creates the copies; DR is the plan, the workflow, and the proof that you can bring critical Fabric workloads back within an acceptable time window.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is how much data you can afford to lose, expressed in time. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is how long the business can wait before analytics is restored. Set both per workload, not per platform.

Continuity covers the things business users see: dashboards that keep working, refreshes that resume, and reports that are reachable. Achieving it requires both backup of items and recovery of the configurations around them.

Backup answers 'do we have a copy?'. Recovery answers 'can we serve the business again?'. A solid DR plan tests both, on a schedule, with named owners.

Inventory critical workspaces and Fabric items, with named owners.

Define RPO and RTO per workload, aligned with business impact.

Verify backup coverage and retention match those objectives.

Document recovery runbooks and rehearse them at least quarterly.

Capture evidence (logs, screenshots) of each test for audit.

Does Microsoft Fabric have built-in disaster recovery? Fabric includes regional resiliency for some services, but workload-level DR for Fabric items still requires an independent backup and recovery plan.

How is DR different from high availability? High availability protects against infrastructure failures; DR protects against data loss, deletion, and misconfiguration.

How often should DR tests be run? At least quarterly for critical workloads, plus after major platform or process changes.