Azure Backup soft delete for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines and SAP HANA in Azure Virtual Machines workloads is now available along with soft delete for Azure Virtual Machines which was already supported.
Soft delete is a security feature to help protect backup data even after deletion. With soft delete, even if a malicious actor deletes the backup of a database, or backup data is accidentally deleted, the backup data is retained for 14 additional days, allowing the recovery of that backup item with no data loss. This additional retention of 14 days of the backup data in the soft delete state doesn’t incur any costs. To understand the feature and its security benefits, see the detailed soft-delete documentation.