Azure Archive Storage

 

• Store rarely accessed data which are held for a period of 180 days.
• Snapshots are not applicable to archive storage.

Features

• It supports 2 rehydrate priorities: High and Standard
  • Standard (Default) – rehydration request may take up to 15 hours.
  • High – rehydration request may finish in under 1 hour for objects under 10 GB in size.
• Long-term backup, secondary backup, and archival datasets
• Lowest storage costs but the highest data rehydrate and access costs
• To read data in archive storage, you need to change the blob tier to hot or cold first.
• Compliance and archival data that must be preserved and are hardly ever accessed.
• Archive storage only supports block blobs
• If a blob is in the archive tier, it can’t be overwritten, unlike in hot or cool tier
• Archive storage cannot be set as a default account access tier
• Archive storage is initially available in selected regions.
• Blob index tags can be read, set, or modified while in the archive.
• You can only copy archive blobs within the same storage account.
• Encrypted data transfer to the cloud using HTTPS, and using 256-bit AES keys to automatically protect the data at rest.

Use Cases

• It is mainly used in long-term backup retention
• If you need to minimize your cost, use Archive Storage to create a low cost, content archiving solution.
• Archive storage provides secure, globally compliant storage for sensitive data.
• You can also use Archive storage if you have a large amount of data that needs to be preserved.

Pricing

• Blobs are stored for at least 180 days in the archive tier. Deleting or rehydrating archived blobs before the minimum number of days will incur early deletion fees.
• Charges on data access increases as the tier gets cooler. For data in the cool and archive access tier, you’re charged a per-gigabyte data access charge for reads.