Blob storage

What is Blob?

Azure Blob Storage is Microsoft's object storage solution for the cloud. Blob Storage is optimized for storing massive amounts of unstructured data. Unstructured data is data that doesn't adhere to a particular data model or definition, such as text or binary data.

How to access Blob?

Users or client applications can access objects in Blob Storage via HTTP/HTTPS, from anywhere in the world.

3 kinds of blob storage

• Block: Variable size blocks, optimized for large blobs
• Page: fixed size blobs, 512 bytes for example. Optimized for random read/write
• Append: used for append operations

Tip

Blob Storage supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Microsoft's enterprise big data analytics solution for the cloud.

Point-in-time restore

• Point-in-time restore provides protection against accidental deletion or corruption by enabling you to restore block blob data to an earlier state
• Point-in-time restore is useful in scenarios where a user or application accidentally deletes data or where an application error corrupts data
• Point-in-time restore also enables testing scenarios that require reverting a data set to a known state before running further tests.

Point-in-time restore requires that the following Azure Storage features be enabled before you can enable point-in-time restore:

1. Soft delete
2. Change feed
3. Blob versioning

Versioning

You can enable Blob storage versioning to automatically maintain previous versions of an object. When blob versioning is enabled, you can access earlier versions of a blob to recover your data if it's modified or deleted.

Each blob version is identified by a unique version ID. The value of the version ID is the timestamp at which the blob was updated. The version ID is assigned at the time that the version is created.

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