Rename blob containers

Question

How do I rename a blob container in an Azure Storage Account? Either in the portal or via CLI? For the (virtual) folders there's a rename-Button, but not for the containers itself.

Is it not possible in the Portal?

Is it possible via CLI?

Answer 1

You can't. It isn't supported. Renaming a container would break anything that relies on that container since you need the container name in order to do anything with it. Hence it isn't easy to do.

The workaround is to do the following:

1. Create a new container with the appropriate name and settings.
2. Copy all the blobs from the old container to the new one.
3. Delete the old container.

Of course how hard or easy that is depends on what options you have enabled on the container and how many blobs are stored in it. For example if you have soft deletes enabled or DR settings then it'll probably be a pain to deal with those. You could disable the options on the old container and enable them on the new container once you're done. If you have a large # of blobs then copying them from 1 container to another is going to be slow as well.

AzCopy was designed for this sort of thing. The docs give the syntax for copying a container from one SA to another but it should work for the same SA I believe. This is probably the easiest approach.