Hi everyone, in this post, I will show you how to enable blob versioning on your Azure storage account using PowerShell and Azure CLI. When blob versioning is enabled, you can restore a previous version of a blob to recover data if modified or deleted by mistake.
What Microsoft Says About Blob versioning: As part of your comprehensive data protection strategy, Microsoft recommends enabling all of the following blob data protection features:
- Blob versioning.
- Container soft delete.
- Blob soft delete.
Important: Disabling blob versioning does not delete existing blob versions. When you turn off blob versioning, any existing versions remain accessible, but no new versions are subsequently created.
Prerequisites
- You can use an existing Storage Account, or you can create a new one. If you want to know how to create a Storage Account using PowerShell, check out this link.
- The Az.Storage module version 2.3.0 or later must be installed.
Azure PowerShell Workaround
If you want to know how to install the PowerShell Azure module on your machine, check out this link.
The simplest way to get started is to sign in interactively at the command line.
1 2 3 | Connect-AzAccount |
This cmdlet will bring up a dialog box prompting you for your email address and password associated with your Azure account.
If you have more than one subscription associated with your mail account, you can choose the default subscription. To perform this task, we will use the following commands:
1 2 3 4 | Get-AzSubscription Select-AzSubscription -Subscription "My Subscription" |
Once you set your default subscription, you’re ready to start.
Set the variables
Here, we define the characteristics of our environment and the resource’s properties.
1 2 3 4 | $resourceGroupName = "RG-DEMO-WE" $stoAccountName = "storageaccountdemowe" |
Enable blob versioning
To enable blob versioning, you should use the Update-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty cmdlet with the following syntax.
1 2 3 4 5 | Update-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty -StorageAccountName $stoAccountName ` -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName ` -IsVersioningEnabled $true |
Verify the changes made
You can verify that versioning is enabled by using the Get-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty cmdlet with the following syntax.
1 2 3 4 | Get-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty -StorageAccountName $stoAccountName ` -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName |
Then, you can check that the versions are created on the write operation using the following commands. In the following example, I have a container, “folder01,” containing a blob “Text_Document.txt.”
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | $stoaccount = Get-AzStorageAccount -Name $stoAccountName ` -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName Get-AzStorageContainer -Name folder01 ` -Context $stoaccount.Context ` | Get-AzStorageBlob -IncludeVersion |
As you can see, using the following command, you can list all the blob versions.
1 2 3 4 5 6 | Get-AzStorageContainer -Name folder01 ` -Context $stoaccount.Context ` | Get-AzStorageBlob -IncludeVersion ` | Select-Object Name, VersionId, LastModified, IsLatestVersion |
Disable blob versioning
To disable blob versioning, you should use the Update-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty cmdlet with the following syntax.
1 2 3 4 5 | Update-AzStorageBlobServiceProperty -StorageAccountName $stoAccountName ` -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName ` -IsVersioningEnabled $false |
Azure CLI Workaround
In this case, we will use Azure Cloud Shell, a browser-based shell built into Azure Portal. This allows us to use the Azure command-line tools (Azure CLI and Azure PowerShell) directly from a browser. If you want to know more about Azure Cloud Shell, check out this link.
First, we define the characteristics of our environment and store the values in variables.
1 2 3 4 | resourceGroupName="RG-DEMO-WE" stoAccountName="storageaccountdemowe" |
Enable blob versioning
To enable blob versioning in your storage account, you should use the following command.
1 2 3 4 5 | az storage account blob-service-properties update --account-name $stoAccountName \ --resource-group $resourceGroupName \ --enable-versioning true |
Verify the changes made
You can verify that blob versioning has been enabled by using the following command.
1 2 3 4 | az storage account blob-service-properties show --account-name $stoAccountName \ --resource-group $resourceGroupName |
Then, you can check that the versions are created on the write operation using the following commands. In the next example, I have a container, “folder01,” containing a blob “Text_Document.txt.”
1 2 3 4 5 6 | az storage blob list --account-name $stoAccountName \ --container-name "folder01" \ --include v \ --output table |
As you can see, using the following command, you can list all the blob versions.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | az storage blob list --account-name $stoAccountName \ --container-name "folder01" \ --include v \ --query '[].{Container:container, Name:name, VersionID:versionId, IsCurrentVersion:isCurrentVersion}' \ --output table |
Disable blob versioning
To disable blob versioning, you should use the following command.
1 2 3 4 5 | az storage account blob-service-properties update --account-name $stoAccountName \ --resource-group $resourceGroupName \ --enable-versioning false |
Thanks for reading my post. I hope you find it helpful.
If you want to know more about Azure blob versioning, check out this link.
