Backup with Azure Cool Blob Storage

A few weeks ago Microsoft introduced the concept of "Cool" Blob Storage on Azure, which means that you get REALLY cheap storage for data that you don't access very often - backup being an obvious usecase. In my case I have used Dropbox for backups for a while, and although it works fine for a certain amount of data, it is not really a good fit for backing up that family photos and videos once a year from the home NAS.

So I choose to give Cool Blob Storage a try, and getting it up and running was just as easy as I had hoped.

• Create a storage account through the Azure portal. New -> Data + Storage -> storage account.
• Choose blob storage as account kind, and pick a suitable resource group and location.
• Make sure to pick Cold as the access tier, and click create.
• Add a container to your new storage account, and pick private as the access type.

Now you have a container to use for your valuable backups. Next you need tooling, where the easiest way to get going is to use a tool called AzCopy. Install it and put the installation folder %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Azure\AzCopy in your path.

Now you are ready to copy files to cool storage. Most commonly this will mean running a command like this.

AzCopy /Source:"C:\localFolderToBackUp"
/Dest:https://<storageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net/<containerName>
/DestKey:<storageKey> /S /XO

/S means to copy the files in the source folder recursively.
/XO means to exclude files that are older than the same file at the destination.

That is it, now you have your backup safely tucked away in the cloud. To download your files you simply run.

AzCopy /Source:https://<storageAccountName>.blob.core.windows.net/<containerName>
/Dest:"C:\localFolderForRestore"
/SourceKey:<storageKey> /S /XO

“Real men don’t backup their data… Real men cry a lot”.