I have no idea about the former but yes, it is a valid excuse for latter. Ok, maybe not that specific one but in general backups are going to be excluded, especially those stored on tapes or WORM media - no one expects company to remove offending record here and now, as long it is inaccessible for all practical purposes.

The GDPR says:

> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay

"Undue delay" is subjective, but "we'll keep backups of your data for a week in case you change your mind" seems easy to justify in court.

Which sounds great, except that Azure SQL -- like many cloud services -- was carefully designed to be a tarpit into which you can import your data, but can't get your data back out.

For example, for at least a few years its "external" backups were simply the bacpac export function, which wasn't transactionally consistent and had all sorts of fun limits.