In theory, requesting the backup of the online database seems very easy and straightforward. We basically need to raise a support ticket with Microsoft and provide the following details.
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SQL Version – Standard or Enterprise
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SQL Year of the version. In our case it was (Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (SP1) (KB3182545) – 13.0.4001.0 (X64) Oct 28 2016 18:17:30 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation Standard Edition (64-bit) on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter 6.3 <X64> (Build 14393)
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Global Admin E-mail Address – to who the backup will be shared.
We had requested the same, some 3 weeks back. In our case, the Database size of our production was around 600 GB out of which 200 GB were occupied by Audit Data. For some business-specific reason, we wanted to have the backup of Audit Data with us before we delete it. Now, this Audit has a separate story with it, when we tried deleting it from UI we got the SQL Time Out issue and on raising the support ticket when Support Team tried the same through back end it, resulted in our Production Server being down briefly for few minutes. We also tried to take the back up through 3rd party tools using SSIS, however again we ran into some issue where the tool was not able to pull the Audit Data for few of the entities.
Well to cut the story short, it is around 21 days after we raised the request, and we are yet to receive the backup of our production database, we have been told that support team is actively working on it and it is because of the large size of the organization.
Will keep posting the update on the backup and the Audit deletion.
The purpose of this blog post was to share that certain things might seem straightforward and would have taken maximum few hours, could still run into issues and challenges causing delays. So, when we plan for it we need to aware of these factors as well.
Hope it helps..
Nishant Rana's Weblog 
For similar reasons we have asked to get db backup too. Unfortunately we were told by support engineer that is is not possible for 9.x versions. 😦
As a workaround was introduced unsupported management API.
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Thanks for sharing your experience.
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