Blob Archive Storage

Configure Azure Blob Archive Storage

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Azure storage is great. Good thought to open on right? Of course! This year Azure graced us with the ability to (preview) the new Azure Archive Storage. Obviously this is enticing, especially at it’s  (current) $0.0018/GB price point. For more cost informaiton on Azure Archive Storage you can visit the link below.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

Now this is nice, but I found myself a bit perplexed. How do I configure a storage account as an “archive” storage account? As it turns out, you don’t. Let’s walk though configuring an archive blob tier.

First, obiously you need a storage account. The Archive access tier is currently available on either “Blob” or “General Purpose v2”.  General Purpose v2 will work the same way, you’ll just also have the ability to host non-blob storage (File, Queue, Table). I’m going to just choose Blob though for this purpose.

Account kind selected, I’ll create the storage account. You can choose whatever Access Tier you’d like, that’s the access tier all of your objects will inheret by default. I choose “Cool” here because you will have to upload data before you can archive it and the cool tier saves money initially.

Alright storage account created, let’s go open it up.

If you go to the “Configuration” tab you can see the default acces tier you selected durring creation. Here is where I was a bit confused, why don’t I have the ability to select archive? You’ll see in a bit.

Go ahead and create a container, and upload a file. I created a container with the very complex name of “container1”, and have uploaded my very important image file that I want to archive.

Can see above that the inhereted access tier is “Cool” which was set at the storage account level. If you go into the blob properties you can see at the bottom there is an option to select the access tier for that specific file. Ah! There is it, Archive!

I’ll go ahead and select Archive, and see the the following message.

Please be cognizant of this, they aren’t kidding when they say that rehydration can take a long time. We can now refresh and see that the file is set to an access tier of “archive”.

Fantastic, we’ve archived the file! Now here is where you have to be careful, while the file is in archive the only data you’re able to access is the file metadata. The file itself is NOT ACCESSABLE until rehydrated. If you try and download the file while archived you can see the following message.

Archive storage is designed to be very long-term storage that you don’t need to access immediately, thus the low cost point. If you do need to access your file, you simply go back to that object and change it’s access tier to either Cool or Hot. It will then go through the “rehydration” process to move the file back into an accessable access tier.

I urge you to take that message seriously, in this example it took about 8 hours for my 48k image file to be rehyrated. They say it takes longer for larger files, and I’m going to test that next. Though in the mean time, assume it will take quite some time to be accessable again. After which time, WHEW! I recovered my very, very important file.

There you go, how to configure Azure Blob Archive Storage.

I hope I’ve made your day at least a little bit easier.

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