Migrating Azure Blob Storage to AnubizHost Offshore

Azure egress is ~$0.087/GB to the public internet for the first 10TB. A 1TB Blob container costs ~$87 to migrate out. Generate a SAS token with read-only access for the source containers; don't use account keys for bulk operations.

List containers and sizes via the Azure portal or with az storage blob list --container CONTAINER --output table.

Install MinIO on an AnubizHost storage VPS as described in our S3 migration guide. Create buckets matching Azure container names with mc mb local/mycontainer.

For very large datasets, set up MinIO in distributed mode across multiple AnubizHost VPS instances for redundancy and throughput.

Configure rclone with an Azure Blob remote (backend type: azureblob, auth via SAS) and MinIO remote (s3, custom endpoint). Sync:

rclone sync azure:mycontainer minio:mycontainer \
  --transfers=16 --checkers=32 \
  --azureblob-chunk-size=64M \
  --progress --log-file=/var/log/rclone.log

rclone handles Azure's blob lease semantics, retries on transient errors, and resumes on interruption.

Azure SAS tokens don't work on MinIO. Generate equivalent S3 pre-signed URLs from MinIO with mc share download for any URLs that need to remain valid. For dynamic URL generation, update your application's URL-generation code to use the S3 SDK pre-sign methods.

Test critical URLs after generation. Update CDN origins (if Azure CDN was in front of Blob) to MinIO endpoint.

MinIO on AnubizHost offshore gives you full control over storage, no Microsoft jurisdiction, and predictable monthly cost (no per-GB egress). Lifecycle rules, versioning, and replication are all supported. Related reading: offshore storage, S3 migration, Azure VM migration.