You're correct. Copy operation using SAS on both source and destination blobs is only supported when source and destination blobs are in same storage account. Copying across storage accounts using SAS is still not supported by Windows Azure Storage. This has been covered (though one liner only) in this blog post from storage team: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2013/11/27/windows-azure-storage-release-introducing-cors-json-minute-metrics-and-more.aspx. From the post:
Copy blob now allows Shared Access Signature (SAS) to be used for the
destination blob if the copy is within the same storage account.
UPDATE
So I tried it and one thing I realized is that it is meant for copying all blobs from one container to another. Based on my trial/error, a few things you would need to keep in mind are:
- Source SAS is for source container and not the blob. Also ensure that you have both
Read
and List
permission on the blob container in the SAS.
- If you want to copy a single file, please ensure that it is defined as "filepattern" parameter.
Based on these, can you please try the following:
AzCopy "https://<source account>.blob.core.windows.net/<source container>?<source container sas with read/list permission>" "https://<destination account>.blob.core.windows.net/<destination container>" "<source blob name to copy>" /DestKey:"destination account key"
UPDATE 2
Error parsing source location [container-location]: Object reference
not set to an instance of an object.
I was able to recreate the error. I believe the reason for this error is the version of storage client library (and thus the REST API) which is used to create SAS token. If I try to list contents of a blob container using a SAS token created by using version 3.x of the library, this is the output I get:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<EnumerationResults ServiceEndpoint="https://cynapta.blob.core.windows.net/" ContainerName="vhds">
<Blobs>
<Blob>
<Name>test.vhd</Name>
<Properties>
<Last-Modified>Fri, 17 May 2013 15:23:39 GMT</Last-Modified>
<Etag>0x8D02129A4ACFFD7</Etag>
<Content-Length>10486272</Content-Length>
<Content-Type>application/octet-stream</Content-Type>
<Content-Encoding />
<Content-Language />
<Content-MD5>uflK5qFmBmek/zyqad7/WQ==</Content-MD5>
<Cache-Control />
<Content-Disposition />
<x-ms-blob-sequence-number>0</x-ms-blob-sequence-number>
<BlobType>PageBlob</BlobType>
<LeaseStatus>unlocked</LeaseStatus>
<LeaseState>available</LeaseState>
</Properties>
</Blob>
</Blobs>
<NextMarker />
</EnumerationResults>
However if I try to list contents of a blob container using a SAS token created by using version 2.x of the library, this is the output I get:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<EnumerationResults ContainerName="https://cynapta.blob.core.windows.net/vhds">
<Blobs>
<Blob>
<Name>test.vhd</Name>
<Url>https://cynapta.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/test.vhd</Url>
<Properties>
<Last-Modified>Fri, 17 May 2013 15:23:39 GMT</Last-Modified>
<Etag>0x8D02129A4ACFFD7</Etag>
<Content-Length>10486272</Content-Length>
<Content-Type>application/octet-stream</Content-Type>
<Content-Encoding />
<Content-Language />
<Content-MD5>uflK5qFmBmek/zyqad7/WQ==</Content-MD5>
<Cache-Control />
<x-ms-blob-sequence-number>0</x-ms-blob-sequence-number>
<BlobType>PageBlob</BlobType>
<LeaseStatus>unlocked</LeaseStatus>
<LeaseState>available</LeaseState>
</Properties>
</Blob>
</Blobs>
<NextMarker />
</EnumerationResults>
Notice the difference in <EnumerationResults>
XElement.
Now AzCopy
uses version 2.1.0.4 version of the storage client library. As a part of copying operation it first lists the blobs in source container using the SAS token. Now as we saw above the XML returned is different in both versions so storage client library 2.1.0.4 fails to parse the XML returned by storage service. Because it fails to parse the XML, it is not able to create a Blob
object and thus you get the NullReferenceException
.
Solution:
One possible solution to this problem is to create a SAS token using version 2.1.0.4 version of the library. I tried doing that and was able to successfully copy the blob. Do give it a try. That should fix the problem you're facing.