I have about 1.5 PB stored in the Archive tier of a storage account. The data is no longer needed, and I want to delete it all and disable the lifecycle rule that moves new data into Archive.
My original assumption was that removing the Archive tier would rehydrate the data and move it into Cold storage, after which I could delete it. If I kept the data in Cold for one week, I estimated the storage cost as follows: 1,500 TB × $4 per TB per month = $6,000 per month, or about $1,400 for seven days in a 30-day month.
Does that estimate make sense, and would rehydration add separate retrieval charges? More importantly, is there a way to delete Archive blobs directly without rehydrating them?
3 Answers
Your Cold storage calculation is reasonable as a rough storage-only estimate: 1,500 TB × $4 per TB per month is about $6,000 monthly, which works out to roughly $1,400 for seven days assuming a 30-day month. However, rehydrating 1.5 PB would also incur data retrieval charges, potentially around $30,000 at an approximate $0.02 per GB rate, so rehydrating before deletion would be much more expensive than deleting directly.
You can delete blobs directly while they are still in the Archive tier. Rehydration is not required, and the portal, CLI, and SDK support deleting archived blobs. The simplest approach is to delete the data in place and then disable or update the lifecycle rule so new blobs are not archived.
Also check the Archive minimum storage duration. If any blobs have been in Archive for less than 180 days, deleting them can result in a prorated early-deletion charge for the remaining portion of that period. This is effectively payment for the unused minimum-retention time, not a separate rehydration requirement.
Exactly—data that has already satisfied the minimum Archive period should not incur that additional early-deletion charge, but newer data may still have a prorated amount.
That is what I ended up doing. The archived blobs were still accessible for deletion, so I removed them without rehydrating anything.