Blob storage

Blob storage has the advantage of better scalability. When your Sitefinity Cloud database becomes too big, handling and restoring it may become time consuming. In this case, it is best to use Blob storage for your media files.

Sitefinity Cloud uses Azure Blob storage provider, which is an implementation of a cloud blob storage provider that stores the binary blob data of Sitefinity Cloud library items on Azure storage. 
For more information, see Microsoft documentation » Introduction to Azure Blob storage.

PREREQUISITES: You must have purchased Sitefinity Cloud Blob storage add-on. 

The storage allocated for the blob is 1 TB for all of your environments. To calculate how much storage you will have per environment, you have to divide 1 TB by the number of your environments, including the Development environment. You can purchase more storage, if required.

To accommodate for blob storage, Sitefinity Cloud has added an Azure storage account. In this account, there are different blob storage containers – one for each environment. Each environment is configured to work with the respective blob container.

There are three types of blob synchronization:

• Restore database pipeline
  This pipeline is used to restore the Production database to Staging or Content staging. It is also used to sync the blob container from Production with the blob container of Staging or Content staging.
  

  In this case, when you sync the blobs, any blob media files that are present on Staging or Content staging, but not on Production, are deleted. The blob container from Production replaces the content of the blob container on Staging or Content staging.

• Acquire database backup pipeline
  This pipeline is used to backup and restore the Production, Staging, or Content staging database to the Development environment. It is also used to sync the blob container from the source environment with the blob container of the Development environment.

  In this case, when you sync the blobs, the blob media files that are present on the source environment are merged to the blob files that are on the Development environment. This is done to avoid data loses, in case there are more than one developer, using the same database.

• SiteSync
  Sitefinity SiteSync has out-of-the-box functionality that syncs blob items between different blob containers.
  When you sync content from Content staging to Production, it automatically syncs blob items. If an item is present on Production, but not on Content staging, it is deleted from the Production environment.

The following chart demonstrates how blob containers are synchronized:

For syncing blobs Sitefinity Cloud uses the az storage blob sync functionality of Microsoft. This is an executable file, specially designed to sync blob storages. To syncs different blobs, it compares the timestamp. It has an option to delete destinations, which means that it deletes all files in the destination blob that are not present in the source. The destination parameter is set to true for the Restore database and SiteSync pipelines in the cloud and to false for the Acquire database backup by the Development environment. 
For more information, see az storage blob sync.

For more information about changing the storage provider of a library, see Libraries.