Microsoft Azure Storage and Database Part 6 – Azure Blob Storage – Snapshot Using Storage Explorer

Hello Everybody,

Hope you all are doing good !!! 🙂 .

In our last article we have discussed on how to work with blob storage using Storage Explorer. Today in this article we will continue with Storage Explorer and see how to create a snapshot of a Blob through Storage Explorer.

Previous Azure series :

1. Learn Basics Of Azure Networking In 60 Hours
2. Learn Basic Of Azure Active Directory And Azure Identity And Access Management
3. Azure DevOps – Learn at one place

If you have missed our previous articles on Azure Storage and Database Series, please check it in following links.

Part 1 – Overview Of Azure Storage and Database

Part 2 – Azure Storage Account

Part 3 – Azure Blob Storage

Part 4 – Work With Azure Blob Storage

Part 5 – Storage Explorer For Azure Storage

Next Article : Part 7 – Azure Blob Storage – Shared Access Signature (SAS)

Blob snapshots :

As we know Azure Storage always stores multiple copies of our data. When we used Geo-redundant Storage (GRS), it is replicated to the paired region. This way, GRS prevents that data is lost in case of disaster. But, GRS cannot prevent data loss when application errors corrupt the data. Corrupted data is then just replicated to other zones/regions. So it is very difficult to restore a correct form of data, if we don’t have a correct backup with us. In that case, a backup is needed to restore our data and here Snapshots works like a charm. There is other approach to take back up / incremental back up of blob but taking snapshot and restore a snapshot is very efficient and quick.

Blob snapshots is one of the best features of the blob storage service and it has the ability to create snapshots of the blobs that can be used for tracking changes done on a blob over different periods of time. Actually Snapshots provides an automatic and free versioning mechanism of same file. They work by saving any changes done on the blob on a separate snapshot along with its timestamp. Using snapshots, we can rollback any changes done on a blob to a specific point in time or even to the original blob.

Storage Explorer :

In our last article we have discussed about Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer as it makes easy to work with Azure Storage data on any platform( Windows, macOS, and Linux). Although there are many ways (Azure portal, Rest API, Powershell) to create a snapshot but today we will use Storage Explorer to create a blob snapshot. So let’s follow the below steps.

Step 1 – Open Storage Explorer and Login to our subscription as we have discussed in our last article. Move to the Storage Account => Blob container => Select the file on which we are going to work as shown in the following figure.

Step 2 – One we select the blob for which we are creating the snapshot, Right click on the file => Select Create Snapshots from context menu to create snapshots as shown in the following figure. When it create a snapshot, it added a time stamp to the file name.

Step 3 – In the following figure we can see the notification when we create new snapshots

Step 4 – To see the list of snapshots created for a particular blob, Right Click on the file => Manage History => Manage Snapshots . It will show all created snapshots.

Step 5 – If at any point time, we found that, the current version of blob is corrupted or damaged and we need to restore a correct backup then first find out the correct version of the snapshot from this list and restore or Promote it. It is very easy to find the correct version as the time stamp is added to the name of the file. To restore or Promote a snapshot, Right click on the snapshot => select Promote Snapshot. Another way is to select the snapshot and click Promote Snapshot image/link from top bar.

Snapshot By URI :

Blob storage has also the ability to create Blob snapshots through URI. These are useful for creating a snapshot of a specific blob at a specific point in time. For example if we have a blob with the following URI –

https://kj21storageacount.blob.core.windows.net/kj-container/Annapurna Moharana.pdf

The snapshot URI’s will look similar as shown below. Each snapshot for a given blob is differentiated by its unique timestamp.

https://kj21storageacount.blob.core.windows.net/kj-container/Annapurna Moharana.pdf/snapshot=2021-05-16T14:05:05.1940000Z

I hope this is informative to you. Please let me know if I missed anything important or if my understanding is not up to the mark. To learn more click here.

Next Article : Part 7 – Azure Blob Storage – Shared Access Signature (SAS)

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Thanks for reading 🙂 .