Backups & Disaster Recovery with Power BI Sentinel
Power BI Sentinel provides full backup and documentation functionality for your Power BI reports and datasets.
Power BI Backups
Power BI Sentinel Backups ensures that all historic versions of Power BI documents are stored in a safe place as part of your disaster recovery and rollback strategy. These backups are stored safely in your own Azure Storage account, and therefore can be downloaded on demand by anyone with access.
Backups are stored as PBIX files, and contain a view of both the report front end, and a copy of the dataset at that time, allowing point in time comparisons of metrics and data across your tenant.
Backups can be accessed either directly via your storage account explorer, or the Power BI Sentinel portal, where they can be downloaded into Power BI Desktop, and republished as needed.
Power BI Disaster Recovery
When your organisation relies on the insight that comes from using Power BI, any drop in service will prevent your employees from working as efficiently.
Therefore, it is vital to minimize the recovery time if anything goes wrong. Whether this is someone deleting a report accidentally or maliciously, or inadvertently breaking a report by making a change. If something goes wrong, you need to recover quickly and painlessly without having to ask a team of developers to unpick the problem by hand.
Power BI Sentinel backs up your Power BI files on a regular basis (and even tells you what has changed between versions), allowing you to roll back or disaster recover in only a few minutes.
Power BI Compliance
When your Power BI files are backed up, they also contain the data as is was on the day. So at any point in the future you can use this as a time machine, and review what the data was at the time.
This is invaluable for compliance purposes, being able to view any historic version of a report and its data, interactively, on demand.
Features:
- Daily or Weekly scheduled backups of PBIX files from PowerBI.com to your Azure Storage account.
- Historic version download/rollback facility.
- Enables disaster recovery for all of your critical Power BI documents
Scenario:
A user deletes a critical Power BI report, or makes a change that breaks the report.
Simply download yesterday's backup from Power BI Sentinel and roll back to this working version, minimising downtime of the report.
Limitations of Power BI and PBIX Backups
The standard format for Power BI reports is the PBIX file type. You may also see items such as PBIT or PBIP, which are variations on the standard Power BI save file for different purposes like template or project files. Power BI uses PBIX as the standard filetype to download your reports and datasets, you can download these directly from your Power BI.com portal.
Power BI Sentinel utilises these PBIX files, aquires them for you, and sends them to your configured Azure storage account for later consumption or recovery when needed.
There are however, several scearios where PBIX files are not generated by Power BI, and thus cannot be backed up via standard PBIX backup methodology.
These include
- Large Dataset Storage Format Semantic Models
- Reports & Datasets created via the PowerBI Service
- Datasets deployed via pipelines
- Datasets using incremental refresh
- Datasets modified via XMLA
Should your reports or datasets utilize any of these features or methods. You cannot back them up using the standard method.
Fortunately, Power BI Sentinel is able to utilize clever functionality and create ABF Backups of your datasets where PBIX cannot be processed. SQL Server Analysis Services Backup Files or (ABF), allow dataset only backups to be taken directly from your premium workspaces and are sent to an azure storage account that has been linked to each workspace.
For more information on ABF backups, visit our dedicated info page here: https://www.powerbisentinel.com/abf-backups/
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