Archive tier block azure storage redundancy upgrade - after rehydration

Hi @ Michal Sumega,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform.

It looks like you’ve done everything by the book to rehydrate your archive blobs yet you’re still getting blocked when switching from LRS to RA-GRS. A few things could be hiding in the background:

• Soft-deleted blobs/containers
• Even if you set soft-delete retention to 1 day, any blobs deleted before that change will remain in the “recycle bin” until their original retention window lapses. That can easily take more than a week if your old retention was longer.
• You can explicitly list soft-deleted blobs with PowerShell (or Azure Storage Explorer’s “show deleted blobs” toggle) and then purge them.

For example:

$ctx = (Get-AzStorageAccount -ResourceGroupName RG -Name YourAccount).Context
Get-AzStorageContainer -Context $ctx | ForEach-Object {
  Get-AzStorageBlob –Container $_.Name –Context $ctx –IncludeDeleted |
    Where-Object { $_.IsDeleted –eq $true } |
    Remove-AzStorageBlob –Context $ctx –Confirm:$false
}

That forces purging of deleted blobs instead of waiting out the retention period.

Snapshots and blob versions

• Snapshots and previous versions in archive don’t show up in a simple “list active blobs” call, but they still count against your account’s tier mix.
• List them explicitly with –IncludeSnapshots and –IncludeVersions, check their AccessTier, then either delete or rehydrate them.

Hidden” archive blobs;

Running the built-in Storage Account Tiering diagnostic in the Azure portal (StorageAccountTierInsight) can catch any remaining archive-tier objects, including ones in deleted containers, snapshots, or versions.

You can also script a full account scan in PowerShell or CLI to find any stragglers:

$all = Get-AzStorageContainer –Context $ctx | ForEach-Object {
  Get-AzStorageBlob –Container $_.Name –Context $ctx –IncludeSnapshots –IncludeDeleted –IncludeVersions
}
$all | Where-Object { $_.Properties.AccessTier –eq 'Archive' }

Bulk rehydration recommendations

• If you truly have millions of blobs, use one of our bulk tiering solutions instead of the portal: – AzCopy: azcopy set-tier --account-name YourAccount --container YourContainer --tier Cool --recursive – The bulk rehydrate sample PowerShell/CLI script
• Temporarily disable any lifecycle management rule that keeps moving blobs back to archive.
• Once you can prove (via the diagnostic or your own script) that there are zero archive-tier objects—including deleted blobs, snapshots, and versions—the SKU change to RA-GRS should succeed.

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