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Lifecycle management policies that delete blobs

You can use lifecycle management policies to transition blobs to delete blob at the end of their lifecycle. This article contains examples of policy definitions that delete blobs.

For general information about Azure Storage lifecycle management policies, see Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management overview.

Expire data based on age

Some data is expected to expire days or months after creation. You can configure a lifecycle management policy to expire data by deletion based on data age. The following example shows a policy that deletes all block blobs that haven't been modified in the last 365 days.

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "name": "expirationRule",
      "enabled": true,
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": [ "blockBlob" ]
        },
        "actions": {
          "baseBlob": {
            "delete": { "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 365 }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Note

The baseBlob element in a lifecycle management policy refers to the current version of a blob.

Delete data with blob index tags

Some data should only be expired if explicitly marked for deletion. You can configure a lifecycle management policy to expire data that are tagged with blob index key/value attributes. The following example shows a policy that deletes all block blobs tagged with Project = Contoso. To learn more about blob index, see Manage and find data on Azure Blob Storage with blob index.

{
    "rules": [
        {
            "enabled": true,
            "name": "DeleteContosoData",
            "type": "Lifecycle",
            "definition": {
                "actions": {
                    "baseBlob": {
                        "delete": {
                            "daysAfterModificationGreaterThan": 0
                        }
                    }
                },
                "filters": {
                    "blobIndexMatch": [
                        {
                            "name": "Project",
                            "op": "==",
                            "value": "Contoso"
                        }
                    ],
                    "blobTypes": [
                        "blockBlob"
                    ]
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

Note

The baseBlob element in a lifecycle management policy refers to the current version of a blob.

Manage previous versions

For data that is modified and accessed regularly throughout its lifetime, you can enable blob storage versioning to automatically maintain previous versions of an object. You can create a policy to delete previous versions. The version age is determined by evaluating the version creation time. This policy rule deletes previous versions that are 365 days or older.

{
  "rules": [
    {
      "enabled": true,
      "name": "versionrule",
      "type": "Lifecycle",
      "definition": {
        "actions": {
          "version": {
            "delete": {
              "daysAfterCreationGreaterThan": 365
            }
          }
        },
        "filters": {
          "blobTypes": [
            "blockBlob"
          ],
          "prefixMatch": [
            "activedata/"
          ]
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

Note

The version element in a lifecycle management policy refers to a previous version.

See also