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Blob Storage Account Lifecycle Maintenance

Andy Brownsword deletes some files but wants to keep other files:

A hierarchy of directories which contain files. That’s how we typically think about file storage. That’s not quite the same everywhere. In Blob Storage a file can appear to be in a directory, but when it’s removed so is the directory.

This can occur when using Lifecycle Management to help purge legacy blobs, which can be unexpected. Let’s look at a way we can help remediate this.

One important thing to remember about Azure blob storage accounts and S3 buckets is that there’s really no concept of a directory structure. It’s all keys, where your key might be dir1/dir2/dir3/file.txt. This is a bit different for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and its notion of hierarchical namespaces (i.e., folders). But Andy does walk through some of the consequences of this and how to work with lifecycle maintenance policies to delete only certain sets of files.