Deleting Folders From Azure Storage Containers or File Shares That are Older than X Days

Question

I am using Azure Storage Accounts and trying to work with powershell to delete folders that exist on a container (I know the container is just a 2 layer hierarchy and the blobs concept and that folders do not actually exist per say).

Apart from not being able to check a folder date/time properties, on the blobs themselves the only property I could find is "last modified" which is generally OK for our purpose, although having creation property is better. As I understand the only solution for this is to create a table and list each file and its creation time and date? seems like a lot of work for this matter.

I can enumerate a file from that folder as they are all copied together and then delete all blobs sharing the root "folder" but I would prefer to know the actual last modified time of the folder itself than the files in it. Is there any way to achieve this? Now, I am not LOCKED on using azure storage containers, file shares are also possible, but when I tried that, enumerating the folders was possible, but the modifed date and time property is just not filled for some reason, and that is the only property there aside of "ETag".

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As far as I know, allowing users to define expiration policies on blobs natively from storage is still planned, we can find it in this Azure storage feedback.

If you’d like to delete ''expired'' folders/files using powershell script, you can try to include path information with datetime in blob names (such as 2017/10/test.txt), and then you can list and traverse the blobs to compare datetime part in blob name with current datetime, if the blob is older than x days, delete it.

Besides, if you do not want to include path information with datetime in blob names, you can try to store creation datetime in properties or metadata, and then you can retrieve creation datetime of blob from properties or metadata, and compare creation datetime with current datetime to determine if delete the blob.