How can I mirror an SQL Azure Database on a regular windows server?

I'm considering migrating our existing SaaS website to Windows Azure.

But while Azure looks nice and is probably more开发者_如何学运维 stable than a regular Windows server, I still want to to have some kind of backup plan in case that the whole Azure should go down. Call me paranoid, but it has happened for other clouds multiple times before (http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/04/21/amazon-ec2-goes-down-taking-with-it-reddit-foursquare-and-quora/).

If that should ever happen, I still want to have our single windows server available for hosting our app.

It's not too difficult to deploy to both azure and our own webserver from the same code base, but I am not sure how to go about mirroring the SQL Azure db to my windows server.

Is there any way to do this? Also, what edition of SQL server do I need to on my windows server to make this work?

You can use SQL Azure Data SYNC CTP 2 to sync your SQL Azure DB with on premise DB; But Data SYNC is in CTP, so you can you can also use - SQL Azure migration wizard, SSIS, BCP, SQL server import/export, etc to have a backup copy.

Links:

1. SQL Azure migration wizard: http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/
2. SQL Azure DATA SYNC http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/sqlazure/datasync/

You might try SQL Azure Backup - this tool allows you create backups as a single file. And Data Compare SQL synchronizes table data.