Unable to Recover Blobs After Container Deletion – Soft Delete Enabled

Hi Arley Duarte,

this depends on what exactly was enabled and when. Blob soft delete protects blobs, but container recovery requires container soft delete to be enabled as well. They are separate settings.

If only Blob Soft Delete was enabled and Container Soft Delete was not enabled, deleting the container permanently removes the container object itself, and even though blob soft delete protects individual blobs, once the container is gone you cannot easily list or restore them because the container metadata is deleted.

Go to the storage account > Data protection and check if Container soft delete was enabled at the time the container was deleted. If it was enabled and the retention period has not expired, you should see an option to show deleted containers and restore the container from there.

If container soft delete was not enabled, then unfortunately the container deletion is permanent, even if blob soft delete was on. In that case recovery is only possible if you had blob backup configured or if Microsoft support can assist within a very short backend retention window, which is not guaranteed.

So first confirm whether container soft delete was enabled before the deletion. If yes, restore from the deleted containers view. If not and no backup was configured, recovery is very unlikely and you should open a support ticket immediately just in case.

rgds,

Alex

Hi Arley Duarte,

Thanks for reaching out in Microsoft Q&A forum,

Feature enabled: Blob Soft Delete

If the container was deleted without container soft delete enabled, the container and its contents cannot be recovered. The original container and its data are permanently lost, and recreating a container with the same name does not restore the previous data.

Unfortunately, if the container was deleted when container soft delete was not enabled, there is no supported way to recover it. In Azure container recovery is only possible if container soft delete was enabled before the deletion occurred.

Reference:

• Soft delete for blobs - Azure Storage | Microsoft Learn
• Soft delete for containers - Azure Storage | Azure Docs

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

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