Forum Discussion
VHD to Archive Storage
I have a disk with some files (About 1 TB) that will probably never be needed. However they might be needed so I have to keep them somewhere. I thought that the archive storage tier would be the perfect place.
My plan was to detach the VHD from the VM and change the storage tier from hot to archive. If I ever needed the data again I would change from archive back to hot and attach the VHD to a VM. However, after detaching the disk, when I tried to change the tier I got the message "Changing the access tier is only allowed on block blobs that do not have snapshots in an active state." I then realized that the VHD is a page blob and it appears you can't change the tier on a page blob.
I can't be the only one who wants to archive a drive (Or an entire VM) so I suspect I am missing a simple solution.
Any ideas?
I'm spit balling here, but have you considered using AZcopy? You can use it transfer data to/from different storage types.
You can set up another Azure storage account and copy the data from your page blob to a drive you can store cold.
I had read somewhere that with azcopy if it came from a page blob the new copy would still be a page blob and that there wasn't a switch in azcopy to change from page to block blob or vice versa.
However, I didn't verify that so I may have to test it
It may be possible to perform the following using AZcopy v10:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-use-azcopy-v10
...you can sync a Blob container down to a local file system:
AzCopy# If you're using Azure Active Directory authentication the sastoken is not required .\azcopy sync "https://account.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer1" "C:\local\path" --recursive=true
When rehydrating a blob from archive tier to the hot or cool tier, how will I know when rehydration is complete?
During rehydration, you may use the get blob properties operation to poll the Archive Status attribute to confirm when the tier change is complete. The status reads "rehydrate-pending-to-hot" or "rehydrate-pending-to-cool" depending on the destination tier. Upon completion, the archive status property is removed, and the Access Tier blob property reflects the new hot or cool tier.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-storage-tiers
