Backup/Snapshot of Index
It should be possible for us to snapshot our indices at an interval of our choosing. The location for the snapshot should be Blob Storage.
Why
A data load goes wrong. Currently you are stuffed if this happens. You have no way to rollback.
You want to take a production index + data and restore it into UAT/TEST/DEV. Currently there is no way to do this other than to load from source.

Thank you for your feedback. We’re considering this for a future release of Azure Search.
Thanks,
Elad
Azure Search Product Team
5 comments
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Mohamed commented
This Azure Search Index backup feature would definitely make sense for easier backups, and also would be good to have a functionality to simply stop the service (and controlled start up), this is helpful for billing management.
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David commented
With the addition of the cognitive services to Azure search there is a significant amount of investment made in indexing your documents. i.e you index 1 million documents and OCR them when you are indexing. if that index where to get deleted you would have significant (10k) in charges to reindex those documents. Also having those indexes in multiple environments to test could mean paying multiple times for the same document. There are work rounds to this sure but this coupled with the potential restore times seems to make a good case for snapshots.
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Joseph Ficara commented
Having the ability to backup and restore an index is very important for business continuity.
Although its possible to reload an index, it will take days to reload our index given the amount of data in it.We rely heavily on Azure search and the recovery time objective supported by a re-index is well out of our range of acceptability from a business continuity perspective.
Also having the ability to make a backup and restore it into a higher pricing tier would provide a quicker upgrade solution than populating an index from scratch for the sole purpose of upgrading to the next pricing tier.
Additionally having this feature for internal integration tests is also very useful. In this use case it is helpful to have a golden copy of the index that we reset to after each integration test suite completes. Again being faster than rebuilding an index.
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Youngjae KIM commented
This would be good if it serves regardless of tiers. I'd like to increase tier but there's no option to migrate with zero downtime.
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Sunil Kumar Garrepally commented
Add capability to take the snapshot of indices and restoration of indices to and from Azure Blob Storage or to any other format.
This can also provide a mechanism for archiving indices that you are not using now, but you would like to be able to access in the future.