We were working on the data powering the Xbox console frontend for searches. For example, the metadata that powers a search like "romantic movie". The data was stored in Azure tables. We were all thinking about backup strategies for the data, serialization and deserialization etc. My suggestion was to simply create timestamped copies of the table. That is, if the table was X, the backup would be X_2026-01-18-14-25-00. This required no serialization and deserialization, could run entirely in memory and could shard the processing and was brutally fast. Also, by distributing the copies across multiple regions we could be more reliable. A simple and dumb solution vs a complex one :)