GregLab | Exam Prep

Storage lifecycle

Core

Blob access tiers, lifecycle, and data protection

Hot, cool, cold, archive, lifecycle, soft delete, and versioning decisions.

Key points

  • Hot, cool, and cold are online tiers; archive requires rehydration before normal access.
  • Lifecycle rules automate supported tier and deletion actions by age and filters.
  • Soft delete and versioning retain recoverable deleted or previous blob states.

Best-known use cases

  • Age infrequently accessed blobs into lower-cost tiers.
  • Recover a recently deleted or overwritten blob.

What candidates often confuse it with

  • Lifecycle vs soft delete vs versioning: automatic aging vs deletion recovery vs prior-write history.
  • Online tiers vs archive: immediate access with different economics vs offline state requiring rehydration.

Key takeaway

Combine tier, lifecycle, soft-delete, and version settings so cost automation preserves the required recovery window.

Related services

  • Azure Files
  • Azure Blob Storage

Relevant exam tasks

  • D2.3.S1 — Create and configure a file share in Azure Files
  • D2.3.S2 — Create and configure a container in Azure Blob Storage
  • D2.3.S3 — Configure storage tiers
  • D2.3.S4 — Configure soft delete for blobs and containers
  • D2.3.S5 — Configure snapshots and soft delete for Azure Files
  • D2.3.S6 — Configure blob lifecycle management
  • D2.3.S7 — Configure blob versioning

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Free Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate prep

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Exam Weights

Exam snapshot

AZ-104 at a glance

Level
Intermediate
Duration
100 minutes
Questions
No fixed live question count published
Formats
No guaranteed question-type mix
Scoring
1–1,000 scaled score; 700 minimum passing score

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Exam fidelity: Microsoft does not publish a fixed live question count or guarantee a question-type mix for AZ-104. This lane counts multiple-choice and multiple-response items as exam-style practice. Ordering, matching, and case-study items are supplemental site exercises and do not count toward exam-style accuracy. Practice percentages do not reproduce Microsoft's scaled scoring, and difficulty labels describe this site's Intermediate-level scenario complexity rather than a Microsoft-published question rating.

Reference

AZ-104 topics and reference map

Study links

AZ-104 resources