Azure Archive Storage

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Features

It supports 2 rehydrate priorities: High and Standard
- Standard (Default) – rehydration request may take up to 15 hours.
- High – rehydration request may finish in under 1 hour for objects under 10 GB in size.
Long-term backup, secondary backup, and archival datasets
Lowest storage costs but the highest data rehydrate and access costs
To read data in archive storage, you need to change the blob tier to hot or cold first.
Compliance and archival data that must be preserved and are hardly ever accessed.

Archive storage only supports block blobs
If a blob is in the archive tier, it can’t be overwritten, unlike in hot or cool tier
Archive storage cannot be set as a default account access tier
Archive storage is initially available in selected regions.
Blob index tags can be read, set, or modified while in the archive.
You can only copy archive blobs within the same storage account.
Encrypted data transfer to the cloud using HTTPS, and using 256-bit AES keys to automatically protect the data at rest.

Use Cases

It is mainly used in long-term backup retention
If you need to minimize your cost, use Archive Storage to create a low cost, content archiving solution.
Archive storage provides secure, globally compliant storage for sensitive data.
You can also use Archive storage if you have a large amount of data that needs to be preserved.

Pricing

Blobs are stored for at least 180 days in the archive tier. Deleting or rehydrating archived blobs before the minimum number of days will incur early deletion fees.
Charges on data access increases as the tier gets cooler. For data in the cool and archive access tier, you’re charged a per-gigabyte data access charge for reads.

Sources:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-storage-tiers?tabs=azure-portal
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-rehydration?tabs=azure-portal
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/archive/