Is it possible to recover an azure blob storage file that was overwritten?

Question

Help, I have some images files for work saved in Azure blob storage. some of these images were accidently overwritten in the last few hours? Is there any way I can recover the original files?

Thanks

Answer 1

Sorry, if you mean overwritten as in a file was uploaded to BLOB storage of the same name in the same container, then no, there is no way you can retrieve them. You might call support and ask if there is something they can do, but understand they may not be able to. It's not a normal thing for them to restore things if they even have that capability.

Your BLOB storage account does store your files in triplicate, but if you overwrite one it will overwrite them in all of those copies. Same thing with the Geo-redundant storage accounts in which another triplicate copy is sent to a data center within the same region.

BLOB storage does have the capability for you to Snapshot BLOBs . This is exposed in the REST API as well as the client library. If these overwrites are something that might happen more often you may want to look at snapshotting. The billable storage for the snapshotted BLOBs is based on the delta between the snapshot of the file and the changed file being uploaded/updated. So, if you normally don't replace the files if you take a snapshot when you upload them it won't cost you any more but you can revert if necessary.

As with all of the data in Storage accounts (Table & BLOB), you should feel responsible for backup of the data. The replicas Azure stores are for High Availability, not disaster recovery per se.

Answer 2

You can use operational backup to restore files.

Operational backup can do this:

Point-in-time restore: Blob point-in-time restore allows restoring blob data to an earlier state.