If you have terabytes (TBs) of initial backup data that need to be transferred over a high-latency and low-bandwidth network, you can use the offline-seeding workflow to ship the initial backup copy, on one or more hard drives to an Azure datacenter. You can use this service to transfer initial backup data to Azure by using disks. The Azure Backup offline-seeding process is tightly integrated with the Azure Import/Export service. Through the process of offline seeding, Azure Backup can use disks to upload the offline backup data to Azure.
Initial full backups typically transfer large amounts of data and require more network bandwidth when compared to subsequent backups that transfer only the deltas/incrementals. Azure Backup has several built-in efficiencies that save network and storage costs during the initial full backups of data to Azure.