Articles

The Best Storage for GoPro and Action-Cam Footage in 2026

Jun 9, 2026

Where to Put Terabytes of GoPro Footage

The problem: GoPro Cloud is great for shooting, but its unlimited tier only holds GoPro footage, and only while you keep paying. Once you have a real archive (multiple terabytes of HERO and action-cam video you want to keep for years) you need a cheaper, permanent home that you own.

The short answer: for most people, Backblaze B2 is the best all-round home at $6.95/TB/month with free egress up to 3x what you store. If you download often, Wasabi removes egress math entirely. If you serve footage publicly, Cloudflare R2's zero egress wins. And a local NAS is cheapest over many years if you are willing to maintain it. Here is the full comparison.

The Options at a Glance

Option	Price	Egress	Best for
Backblaze B2	$6.95/TB/mo (about $83/yr per TB)	Free up to 3x stored, then $0.01/GB	The best default for most archives
Wasabi	$6.99/TB/mo, rising to $7.99 on July 1, 2026	Free (no egress or API fees)	Frequent downloads, predictable bills
Cloudflare R2	$15/TB/mo (about $180/yr per TB)	Free (zero egress)	Serving or streaming footage publicly
Local drive or NAS	One-time hardware cost	Free	Largest archives, lowest long-run cost
GoPro Cloud (baseline)	$59.99/yr, unlimited GoPro footage	Bulk download is hard	Capturing and editing, not archiving

Prices are current as of 2026 and change over time. Always confirm before committing a large library.

Backblaze B2: The Best Default

At $6.95 per TB per month, B2 is roughly a quarter of the price of Amazon S3 for storage, and egress is free up to three times the amount you store each month. For a footage archive, where you upload once and download occasionally, that free-egress allowance usually covers normal retrieval, so your bill is essentially just storage.

Cost for 5 TB: about $35/month, or roughly $417/year.
Why it fits GoPro footage: you store a lot and read a little, which is exactly what B2 prices for.
S3-compatible, so it works with standard tools.

For most people archiving GoPro footage, B2 is the recommendation.

Wasabi: No Egress Math

Wasabi charges one flat rate for capacity, with no egress or API request fees at all. The current rate is $6.99/TB/month, increasing to $7.99/TB/month on July 1, 2026. The trade-offs are a 1 TB minimum and a 90-day minimum storage duration per object, so it suits archives you keep rather than data you churn.

Best when you pull footage back frequently and do not want to think about egress allowances.
Watch the 90-day minimum retention: deleting footage early still bills for the remainder of the 90 days.

Cloudflare R2: Zero Egress for Public Footage

R2 costs more to store ($15/TB/month) but charges nothing for egress, ever. That is the opposite balance from B2: you pay more to hold the data and nothing to serve it.

Best when you publish or stream footage to viewers, where egress on other providers would dominate the bill.
Not the cheapest for a private cold archive you rarely read; B2 or Wasabi wins there.

Local Drive or NAS: Cheapest Over Years

A hard drive or a NAS (Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS) is a one-time purchase. An 8 TB drive is well under the cost of a single year of cloud storage at that size, and a NAS gives you redundancy across multiple drives.

Best for the largest archives and the lowest cost measured over five or ten years.
The catch: a single local copy is not a backup. Drives fail, and a fire or theft takes everything. Use a NAS as one leg of a plan, not the whole plan.

There is a full walkthrough in back up cloud storage directly to your NAS.

The 3-2-1 Setup for Footage You Cannot Re-Shoot

Action-cam footage is unrepeatable. The standard rule for irreplaceable data is 3-2-1: three copies, on two kinds of media, with one offsite. A practical version for GoPro footage:

Working copy: GoPro Cloud or your editing machine while a project is active.
Local archive: a NAS or external drive you own.
Offsite copy: Backblaze B2 or Wasabi.

That gives you cheap bulk storage, a fast local copy, and an offsite copy that survives a disaster, for far less than paying a 2 TB consumer plan forever.

How Blober Gets Your Footage There

Whichever destination wins, Blober is what moves the footage into it. It is the only desktop app that connects to GoPro Cloud, so you can:

Pull your entire GoPro Cloud library out (no 25-file zip limit) and push it to B2, Wasabi, R2, or a NAS
Copy footage to two destinations to build the 3-2-1 setup
Organize files on the way in with path templates, so a flat cloud dump lands as a clean camera/date/file archive

Connect GoPro Cloud as the source, pick your storage as the destination, run, and let it resume through any dropped connection.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the cheapest cloud storage for GoPro videos? For a private archive, Backblaze B2 ($6.95/TB/month) and Wasabi ($6.99/TB/month) are the cheapest credible options, both far below Amazon S3 or consumer plans. A local NAS is cheaper still over several years if you maintain it.

Is GoPro Cloud good for long-term storage? It is good for capturing and editing, not for archiving. It only stores GoPro footage cheaply, you lose access if you cancel, and there is no bulk export. Keep a copy elsewhere for the long term.

How do I move footage from GoPro Cloud to Backblaze B2 or Wasabi? Use Blober. It connects to GoPro Cloud and transfers your library directly to B2, Wasabi, or any supported destination, with no manual batching.

Backblaze B2 or Wasabi, which is better for GoPro footage? B2 if you mostly store and rarely download, thanks to its free 3x egress allowance. Wasabi if you download often and want zero egress math, keeping the 1 TB minimum and 90-day retention in mind.

Get Blober

Move your GoPro footage to the storage that actually fits a large archive. Blober is the only app that connects to GoPro Cloud, and it is a one-time purchase with no subscription and no per-GB fees.

Download Blober at blober.io

Cloudinary: Where It Fits and Where It Doesn't

May 30, 2026

What Cloudinary Is

Cloudinary is an image and video platform. You upload a file, you get a URL like res.cloudinary.com/your-cloud/image/upload/w_400,c_fill,f_auto,q_auto/photo.jpg, and Cloudinary handles resizing, format conversion (WebP, AVIF), CDN caching, and delivery. Change a URL parameter, get a new version on demand. The same model covers video, with transcoding and adaptive streaming.

Two other products sit alongside the API: a digital asset management (DAM) tool for marketing teams, sold separately, and MediaFlows for no-code workflow automation. Files are stored on AWS S3 and Google Cloud, in US regions by default.

How the Credit Model Works

Cloudinary does not bill storage, bandwidth, and processing separately. Everything goes through one shared pool of credits (source):

1 credit equals 1,000 transformations, OR 1 GB stored, OR 1 GB delivered, OR 500 seconds of SD video processing, OR 250 seconds of HD video processing.

The pool is flexible: a quiet month uses fewer credits, a viral month uses more. The trade-off is that a single popular video can drain your monthly budget in hours, and you cannot price any one file in isolation.

Two counting details worth knowing:

Transformations count once per unique URL in a month. Repeat views of the same URL are free at the transformation layer (bandwidth still counts).
Bandwidth counts net file bytes served, not HTTPS overhead or retransmits.

The Tiers

All prices monthly. Annual billing saves about 10%.

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per mo)	Credits/mo	Max image	Max video
Free	$0	$0	25	10 MB	100 MB
Plus	$99	$89	225	20 MB	2 GB
Advanced	$249	$224	600	40 MB	4 GB
Advanced Extra	$549	$494	1,350	40 MB	4 GB
Pro PAYG	$1,099	$989	2,750	40 MB	4 GB
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom

The Free plan is permanent, not a trial, and Cloudinary states you can run production on it as long as you stay under 25 credits a month. No credit card required to sign up. 25 credits is roughly 5 GB stored, 10 GB delivered, and 10,000 transformations.

Things that surprise people:

Overages exist only on Pro PAYG ($0.45 per extra credit). On every other paid plan, going over triggers warnings, then partial disable, then full disable. There is no grace period.
Custom domain (CNAME) and HTTPS start at Advanced, not Plus. Many teams hit Plus then jump to Advanced just for cdn.example.com.
SAML SSO, multi-CDN, EU data residency, and AI-powered search are Enterprise-only.
DAM is a separate product. A paid API plan does not raise your DAM limits. Full DAM means a second Enterprise contract.
Add-ons (AI tagging, OCR, Rekognition) have free evaluation tiers; production volume requires a paid Cloudinary plan plus paid add-on tiers.

Where Cloudinary Wins

URL-based transformations. Resize, crop, smart-crop on faces, watermark, overlay text, change format and quality, all by editing the URL. No build step.

Automatic format and quality. Add f_auto,q_auto and Cloudinary picks the smallest format and quality the requesting browser supports. Usually 30 to 70 percent smaller than the original with no manual work.

Video without your own pipeline. HLS and DASH adaptive streaming, transcoding, thumbnails, clipping, captions via add-ons. Video burns credits faster than images (250 to 500 seconds per credit), but you do not need to run FFmpeg.

AI features. Auto-tagging, OCR, content moderation, background removal, generative fill. Most are add-ons, integrated into the upload pipeline.

Migration in is well supported. Lazy auto-upload pulls from your existing URLs the first time anyone requests a file, plus the CLI and Upload API for batch jobs. See the Cloudinary migration guide.

Where It Doesn't Fit

Getting files back out. There is no "export everything" button. The Admin API lists assets and lets you download originals one at a time. Backup to your own S3 starts at the Plus tier and only mirrors new uploads. Moving an existing catalog off Cloudinary is a scripting job, or a workflow in Blober.

Cost predictability under traffic spikes. Shared credits mean one popular asset can blow the monthly budget. The only plan that pays overage in cash instead of suspension warnings is Pro PAYG at $989/month annual.

Pure CDN serving. If you have pre-optimized files and just need a CDN, you are paying for the transformation engine you are not using. Cloudflare R2 (zero egress) or Bunny CDN ($0.005 to $0.01/GB) will be much cheaper.

Data residency. US-only storage by default. EU or other regions require Enterprise.

Self-hosted control. Originals live in Cloudinary's AWS and GCS accounts. You can mirror to your own S3 from Plus upward, but the source of truth is theirs.

Cloudinary vs Alternatives

Cloudflare Images is the cheapest serious option. Free plan covers 5,000 unique transformations per month, no card needed. Paid is $5 per 100,000 images stored, $1 per 100,000 images delivered, $0.50 per 1,000 transformations beyond the free 5,000. Less polish on transformations, no DAM, no add-ons. Video is a separate product (Cloudflare Stream, $5 per 1,000 minutes stored, $1 per 1,000 minutes delivered). Much cheaper than Cloudinary at most scales.

ImageKit is the closest direct competitor. Same URL transformation model, integrated DAM, video processing. Free tier with 20 GB bandwidth, paid from around $49/month with explicit storage and bandwidth caps instead of credits. Pulls from your existing origin (S3, GCS, your server), so files do not have to live in their storage. Easier to leave than Cloudinary.

Imgix is transformation and delivery only. No DAM, no widget, no AI. Points at your existing bucket and serves transformed URLs. Per-master-image plus per-GB pricing. Smaller feature set, originals stay where they are.

Bunny Optimizer adds image transformations on top of Bunny CDN. $9.50/month flat per pull zone plus standard Bunny bandwidth. URL-based transformations and format conversion. Weaker on video and AI than Cloudinary, roughly 10x cheaper at scale.

Uploadcare focuses on upload widget plus transformation pipeline. Per-upload and per-GB pricing, more predictable than credits. Smaller feature set.

Imagor and Thumbor are open source. You host them yourself in front of your own storage. Free in software cost, you pay for servers and ops time. No DAM, no AI, no managed CDN.

Using Cloudinary with Blober

Blober supports Cloudinary as a source and a destination. Connect with your Cloud Name, API Key, and API Secret from the Cloudinary Console and Blober can browse your folders, upload from any other supported provider (Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS S3, Backblaze, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, Rabata, Proton Drive, GoPro Cloud, NAS, local disk), download to any destination, and delete in bulk.

The most useful case is moving out of Cloudinary. Because Cloudinary has no bulk export tool, leaving means listing the catalog, downloading every original, and re-uploading somewhere else. Blober runs that as a single workflow: pick Cloudinary as source, pick the destination, select the files, run it. Transfers stream through your own machine, folders and filenames are preserved, and you can re-run the workflow later to pick up anything new.

The same workflow runs in the other direction if you want to move an existing folder tree from Dropbox or S3 into Cloudinary.

For setup details, see the Cloudinary provider documentation.

Proton Drive Is Hard to Migrate To or From. Blober Makes It Easy.

May 27, 2026

The Privacy-First Cloud Storage That's Hard to Move Files Into

Proton Drive is one of the most privacy-respecting cloud storage services available. End-to-end PGP encryption. Swiss jurisdiction. Open-source clients. Zero-access architecture, so not even Proton can read your files. Over 100 million accounts trust it. If privacy is your priority, Proton Drive is a strong choice.

But there's a catch: Proton built great sync clients, not transfer tools.

Their official apps sync a folder between your device and Proton Drive. That works perfectly when Proton Drive is your only cloud. The moment you need to move files from Google Drive, from Dropbox, from AWS S3, or to Proton Drive from another provider, you're on your own. Download everything locally, then re-upload. For a few gigabytes, that's fine. For 500 GB of photos across three Google accounts, it's a weekend you don't get back.

Where Proton Drive Is Officially Supported

Proton offers native clients on four platforms, plus web access:

Platform	Client	Sync	File Browser	Bulk Transfer From Other Clouds
Windows	✅ Desktop app	✅ Folder sync	✅ Via web	❌
macOS	✅ Desktop app	✅ Folder sync	✅ Via web	❌
iOS	✅ Mobile app	✅ Photo backup	✅ In-app	❌
Android	✅ Mobile app	✅ Photo backup	✅ In-app	❌
Linux	❌ No client	❌	✅ Web only	❌
Web	✅ Browser	❌	✅	❌

Notice the last column. Across every platform, on every client, there is no built-in way to transfer files from another cloud provider into Proton Drive. The official path is: download to your machine, then let the sync client pick it up. That means you need enough free local storage to hold everything in transit.

And if you're on Linux, there is no desktop client at all. You get the web interface, which works but doesn't support drag-and-drop bulk uploads from other services either.

What The Proton Client Does Well (And What It Doesn't)

The Proton Drive clients are well-built for their intended purpose, which is sync, not migration:

What they do well:

Folder sync between your device and Proton Drive
Automatic photo backup on mobile
End-to-end encryption handled transparently
Proton Docs and Sheets integration

What they're not built for:

Moving files between Proton Drive and another cloud
Browsing or selecting files from another cloud as part of a transfer
Repeatable transfer workflows
Linux without a browser

That's the gap Blober fills.

What About rclone?

rclone is the canonical open-source tool for cloud storage. It supports 70+ backends and is genuinely excellent at what it does. Its Proton Drive backend works, with a couple of things worth knowing up front:

Tier 4 (Experimental). rclone classifies its Proton Drive support as Tier 4, meaning it's community-maintained and flagged as "use with care." Known gaps include unsupported modification times, draft conflicts on retries, and stale caching when other clients touch the same files. The underlying Proton-API-Bridge library notes there are "likely quite a few errors."
Password-based auth. To set up rclone with Proton Drive, you provide your Proton email, password, 2FA, and (if applicable) mailbox password through rclone config. These end up in rclone's config file on disk.

If you're already in the rclone ecosystem and these tradeoffs work for you, rclone is a perfectly good fit. Blober is a different style of tool for a different style of user, and the rest of this article is about that.

How Blober Handles Proton Drive Differently

Blober takes a different approach to Proton Drive: instead of asking for your credentials in a config file, it asks Proton for them.

You Just Log In. Normally.

When you connect Proton Drive in Blober, a browser window opens to account.proton.me, which is Proton's own login page. You sign in with your email, password, and 2FA exactly as you would in any browser. Your password never touches Blober. It stays inside the isolated browser session, the same way it does when you log in at drive.proton.me.

What Blober Supports With Proton Drive

Operation	Supported	Details
Browse	✅	Navigate your full folder tree
Download	✅	Parallel, resumable downloads
Upload	✅	Parallel uploads, auto-creates folders
Delete	✅	Moves to Proton Trash (recoverable)
Metadata	✅	Filename, size, created/modified dates
Multiple accounts	✅	Each account gets its own session. Run transfers in parallel

What Blober Does That Proton's Client Can't

Transfer from any supported provider directly to Proton Drive. Google Drive, Dropbox, AWS S3, Azure Blob, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, DigitalOcean Spaces, Wasabi, Rabata, GoPro Cloud, local disk. No intermediate downloads.
Transfer from Proton Drive to any other provider. Moving away from Proton? Moving a subset of files to cold storage on Backblaze? Blober handles it.
Selective file transfer. Browse your source, pick exactly the files you want, transfer only those. Not a full sync of everything.
Saved workflows. Set up "Dropbox to Proton Drive" once, run it whenever you want. The workflow remembers your source path, destination path, filters, and file naming templates.
Works on Linux. Blober runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Since Proton doesn't ship a Linux desktop client, Blober is one of the few ways to get a desktop-native Proton Drive experience on Linux without using a browser.
Resumable transfers. If your session expires mid-transfer, Blober prompts you to re-authenticate and picks up where it left off. No files are lost or duplicated.

The Migration Scenario

Here's the situation Blober is built for:

You're on Google Drive or Dropbox. You've decided to move to Proton Drive for privacy. You have 200 GB of documents and photos spread across folders. Today, your options are:

Option A: Manual download and re-upload

Download 200 GB from Google Drive to your local machine (hours, needs free disk space)
Wait for Proton Drive sync client to upload it all (hours more, CPU-intensive due to encryption)
Repeat for Dropbox
Hope nothing failed silently

Option B: Google Takeout + manual upload

Request a Takeout archive (can take days)
Download the archive(s)
Extract, organize, upload to Proton Drive
Storage used: 3× (source cloud + local archive + Proton)

Option C: rclone

Run rclone config to set up your Google/Dropbox and Proton remotes
Provide your Proton credentials when prompted
Run rclone copy gdrive: protondrive: with the flags that fit your scenario
Drive everything from the CLI, including monitoring and restart

Option D: Blober

Sign in to Google Drive (OAuth) or Dropbox (OAuth)
Sign in to Proton Drive (browser login)
Select the files you want
Start the transfer, then come back and re-run the same workflow whenever you need to

Blober vs rclone for Proton Drive: Side by Side

	Blober	rclone
Auth method	Browser login via Proton's own page	Credentials in `rclone config`
Interface	Native desktop GUI	CLI
Modification times	Preserved from source	Not preserved
Resume on failure	Automatic	Manual restart
Linux	Native desktop app	CLI
Cross-provider transfer	Built-in (select source and destination)	`rclone copy source: dest:`
Multiple Proton accounts	Each one its own session	Separate config remotes
Scriptable automation	Workflows, no cron	Cron-friendly CLI
Mount as filesystem	Not supported	Supported (FUSE)

Who This Is For

Blober is a good fit if:

You're migrating into Proton Drive from Google Drive, Dropbox, or another cloud
You're moving out of Proton Drive to another provider, or shifting a subset to cold storage
You're on Linux and want a desktop-native way to manage Proton Drive files
You'd rather log in through a browser than configure credentials in a file
You want a repeatable, named workflow you can re-run later

rclone is a good fit if:

You're already in the rclone ecosystem and want one tool for everything
You need scriptable, cron-based automation
You want to mount Proton Drive as a filesystem (FUSE)
You prefer CLI control over a GUI

Using Proton Drive with Blober

Proton Drive is a genuine privacy-first storage service. End-to-end PGP. Zero-knowledge architecture. Open clients. The trade-off Proton makes for that privacy is that getting files in or out, at scale, isn't a first-class experience.

That's where Blober comes in. You sign in to Proton Drive through Proton's own login page, pick the cloud you're moving from or to (Google Drive, Dropbox, S3, Backblaze B2, R2, Wasabi, GoPro, NAS, or local disk), choose what you want to move, and let it run. No config files, no CLI, no separate sync clients to install. The same workflow runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

If you have files in other clouds and you want them in Proton Drive, or files in Proton Drive you want elsewhere: that's what Blober is for.

Rabata.io: Where It Fits and Where It Doesn't

May 14, 2026

What Rabata Actually Is

Rabata.io is an S3-compatible object storage provider from RCS Technologies (UK) with two products: Hot Storage, general-purpose object storage at $0.01/GB/month in us-east-1, designed for applications, media, and frequently accessed data, and Backup, bulk archival storage at $49/10TB flat in eu-west-2, intended for backups, disaster recovery, and cold data. Both use standard AWS SigV4 authentication, work with any S3 SDK or CLI, and require no code changes to migrate from AWS S3. You swap the endpoint and credentials.

That is the entire product. No compute layer, no managed databases, no dashboard file browser: you cannot preview or view objects through Rabata's web UI, so you need an S3 client or a tool like Blober to actually see what's in your buckets. Just storage with an S3 API.

What the Benchmarks Show

Rabata published benchmarks using MinIO warp v1.0.7 (released January 2025, now superseded by v1.5.0) on a Debian 13 VM in us-east-1 with 8 concurrent threads in September 2025. The methodology is public.

According to their numbers, Rabata wins upload speed by a small margin (1,462 MB/s vs AWS's 1,444) and mixed operations by 2.3x over AWS. It loses on downloads to both Backblaze (2,075 MB/s) and AWS (1,816), and loses small object throughput to iDrive e2 (962 ops/s vs 696).

The mixed operations number is the most relevant for production workloads. Real applications read, write, list, stat, and delete concurrently. Rabata scored 2.3x higher than AWS S3 in that test.

These are same-region tests (us-east-1 to us-east-1). Performance from other geographies is unknown, and Rabata only operates in two regions. The runs are 30 seconds to 10 minutes with 8 threads, so they measure burst, not sustained multi-TB daily throughput over months. The warp version used (v1.0.7, January 2025) was already 8 months old at the time of testing and is now over a year outdated, and newer versions may produce different results. AWS S3 publishes 99.999999999% durability. Rabata publishes no durability SLA, and their terms include a broad "as is" disclaimer with zero liability for data loss.

The Real Use Case

Rabata fits a specific profile:

Write-heavy S3 workloads that need to stay cheap. If you're ingesting backup pipelines, media uploads, log aggregation, or AI training data, and your bottleneck is upload throughput plus cost, Rabata's upload speed at $0.01/GB is competitive, roughly 57% less than AWS's $0.023/GB first-tier pricing (AWS discounts at volume).

The Backup tier at $49/10TB ($0.0048/GB) is priced below Backblaze B2 ($6.95/TB, ~$0.007/GB) and Wasabi ($6.99/TB, ~$0.007/GB, increasing to $7.99/TB in July 2026). Wasabi enforces a 90-day minimum retention. Rabata's Backup tier has no documented minimum retention, but note: egress is capped at 2x your storage amount and billing is in 10TB increments rounded up: store 1TB and you pay for 10TB.

GDPR-compliant EU storage. The eu-west-2 Backup tier gives you EU data residency, which Rabata calls out explicitly. Worth noting: Rabata's parent company (RCS Technologies) operates under UK law, not EU law. Hetzner also offers EU-based S3-compatible storage with three EU regions (NBG1, FSN1, HEL1) versus Rabata's single EU region. For European companies that need S3-compatible storage with data residency guarantees, both are worth evaluating.

No-friction evaluation. 30-day trial, no credit card required per Rabata's signup page.

Where It Doesn't Fit

Download-heavy workloads. If you're serving content to users, Backblaze B2 (2,075 MB/s downloads, ~$0.007/GB) or Cloudflare R2 ($0.015/GB storage, zero egress, weak throughput but free delivery) are better choices depending on whether you're optimizing for speed or cost.
Global distribution. Two regions. If you need worldwide low-latency access, this is not the product.
Enterprise compliance requirements. No published durability SLA, no SOC 2 mention, limited public track record, benchmarks not independently verified.
Ecosystem depth. No lifecycle policies, no event notifications, no cross-region replication, no versioning (or at least none documented), no dashboard file browser. AWS S3 has all of these. Rabata does not.

Where It Sits Competitively

Based on Rabata's own benchmarks (no independent verification available), they offer three things at once that no other single provider does:

Fastest mixed workload performance in their published benchmarks
Simple pricing at $0.01/GB with $0.01/GB egress (Backup tier: egress capped at 2x storage)
No-barrier trial with no credit card required

AWS is faster on downloads but 2-3x more expensive. Backblaze is comparable on storage (~$0.007/GB) but slower on uploads. Cloudflare R2 has zero egress but performs 3-8x worse. Wasabi has no egress fees but enforces 90-day minimums. iDrive wins on small objects but falls behind on mixed workloads.

If your workload is "ingest data via S3 API, store it cheaply, occasionally read it back," Rabata is worth testing. If your workload needs more features, more regions, or a long track record, look elsewhere.

Using Rabata with Blober

Blober supports Rabata.io as a native provider. Connect with your access key and secret key, and Blober detects your buckets across both regions (Hot Storage and Backup). You can use Rabata as a source or destination in any workflow: migrate to it from AWS S3, sync from Dropbox, back up from Google Drive, or download files from Rabata to your local machine. Since Rabata's dashboard has no built-in file browser, Blober is one of the easiest ways to actually see and manage what's in your buckets.

What Blober supports with Rabata:

Browse: list buckets and objects across both regions (something Rabata's own dashboard doesn't offer)
Upload: write files to Hot Storage or Backup buckets
Download: pull files from Rabata to local storage or stream to another provider
Copy/Move: transfer objects between buckets
Delete: remove objects

Blober handles the region routing automatically. If a bucket lives in eu-west-2, operations go through the eu-west-2 endpoint. No manual configuration needed.

For setup details, see the Rabata.io provider documentation.

How to Bulk Change Azure Blob Storage Access Tiers (Hot, Cool, Cold, Archive)

May 11, 2026

Azure Storage Tiers and the Problem with Managing Them

Azure Blob Storage offers four access tiers: Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive. Each tier has different storage and retrieval costs. The idea is straightforward: keep frequently accessed data on Hot, move older data to Cool or Cold, and archive rarely needed files to Archive for the lowest per-GB rate.

In practice, managing tiers is not that simple. Azure Portal lets you change tiers one blob at a time. For bulk changes, Microsoft points you to PowerShell scripts, Azure CLI, or lifecycle management policies. If you want to move 500 blobs from Hot to Archive, you are either clicking through the portal for an hour or writing and testing a script.

Lifecycle policies help with automated transitions, but they operate on rules and schedules. They are not designed for the case where you look at a set of files and decide, right now, that these specific blobs need to be on a different tier.

Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive: The Tiers at a Glance

Azure Blob Storage has four access tiers. The colder the tier, the less you pay to store data and the more you pay, in both money and time, to read it back. Here is the practical comparison.

Tier	Storage cost	Read cost	Minimum retention	Time to first byte	Best for
Hot	Highest	Lowest	None	Milliseconds	Data in active use
Cool	Lower	Higher	30 days	Milliseconds	Backups, data read about monthly
Cold	Lower still	Higher still	90 days	Milliseconds	Rarely touched data you still want instantly
Archive	Lowest	Highest	180 days	Hours (rehydration)	Long-term archive and compliance copies

Two things catch people out:

Archive is offline. You cannot read an archived blob directly. You first rehydrate it to Hot, Cool, or Cold, which can take up to 15 hours. Plan for that latency before you archive anything you might need quickly.
Early deletion penalty. If you delete, overwrite, or move a blob out of Cool (30 days), Cold (90 days), or Archive (180 days) before its minimum retention elapses, Azure charges a prorated early deletion fee. Moving a blob to Archive and pulling it back two weeks later is not free.

Moving a warmer blob to a cooler tier is instantaneous. Only the reverse, rehydrating from Archive, takes time.

What Blober Does Differently

Blober is a desktop app that connects to Azure Blob Storage as one of its supported providers. Beyond the usual read, write, list, and delete operations, Blober supports something called mutations for Azure Blob. Mutations let you change properties of existing blobs without transferring any data.

Today, Blober supports two types of Azure mutations:

Storage Tier Changes

Select any number of blobs in the Blober file browser, choose a target tier (Hot, Cool, Cold, or Archive), and run the mutation. Every selected blob gets moved to the new tier. No re-upload, no script, no waiting for a lifecycle policy to kick in.

This is useful when you realize a project is finished and its assets should move to Archive, or when you need to bring archived files back to Cool for a review cycle.

Container Access Level Changes

Azure containers can be set to Private, Blob-level public access, or Container-level public access. Changing access levels usually means navigating to each container in the portal and updating the setting. With Blober, you select the containers you want to modify, pick the access level, and apply.

A Real Example: Post-Production Archival

Say you run a media production company. You have a container called project-alpine-2025 with 800 GB of raw footage sitting on Hot storage. The project wrapped three months ago and no one is accessing those files. You are paying Hot rates for storage that should be on Archive.

With Azure CLI, you would write something like:

az storage blob list --container-name project-alpine-2025 --output tsv | \
while read line; do
  az storage blob set-tier --container-name project-alpine-2025 --name "$line" --tier Archive
done

This works, but you need to set up authentication, handle pagination for large containers, deal with blobs that are already archived, and test the script before running it on production data.

With Blober, you open your Azure Blob connection, navigate to the container, select all files, choose "Archive" as the target tier, and click run. Done.

More Mutations Coming

Tier changes and access levels are the first mutations Blober supports for Azure. The architecture is designed to extend this to other providers and other types of modifications. Future mutations could include things like metadata updates, blob tagging, or replication settings. The goal is to give you the same visual, point-and-click control over blob properties that you already have for transfers.

Setting Up Azure Blob Storage in Blober

Connecting Azure to Blober takes about a minute:

Open Blober and add a new provider
Select Azure Blob Storage
Paste your connection string (the same one you would use with Azure Storage Explorer or the SDK)
Blober verifies the connection and lists your containers

From there, you can browse blobs, transfer files to or from Azure, and run mutations on existing blobs.

Configuration Options

When using Azure as a destination, Blober lets you configure:

Storage Tier: Choose which tier new uploads land on (Hot, Cool, Cold, or Archive)
Write Behavior: Overwrite existing blobs, skip if a blob already exists, or skip only if the blob is archived

These options are set per-workflow, so you can have one workflow that uploads to Hot and another that uploads directly to Archive.

Who Needs This

DevOps teams managing storage costs across multiple containers and projects
Media companies archiving completed project assets
Backup administrators moving cold data to cheaper tiers
Anyone who has outgrown Azure Portal's one-blob-at-a-time tier management

Common Questions About Azure Blob Tiers

Does changing a blob's access tier create a new version? No. Changing the tier with the Set Blob Tier operation does not create a new blob version. When versioning is enabled, the operations that create a version are writes: Put Blob, Put Block List, Copy Blob, and Set Blob Metadata. Set Blob Tier is not one of them, so the blob keeps its version ID and only its tier property changes. If you already keep multiple versions, each version holds its own tier, and explicitly tiering a version changes how that version is billed, but no new version is generated.

Can I set the tier per file share or only per storage account? That question is about Azure Files, which is separate from Azure Blob Storage. For Azure Blob, the tier is a property of each blob, so you set it per blob, and Blober changes many at once. For Azure Files, the older standard tiers (transaction optimized, hot, cool) are set per file share rather than per account, but you choose a share's media tier when you create it and cannot move a share between media tiers in place. To change it you create a new share and copy the data over. Blober's bulk tier change applies to Azure Blob blobs.

How long does a tier change take? Moving from a warmer tier to a cooler one, such as Hot to Cool or Cool to Archive, is instantaneous. Bringing a blob back from Archive to an online tier is a rehydration that can take up to 15 hours, depending on the priority you choose.

Can I move blobs to Archive in bulk without PowerShell? Yes. Select the blobs in Blober, choose Archive as the target tier, and run the mutation. No script, no lifecycle policy, no Azure CLI. The same works in reverse to rehydrate selected blobs to Hot, Cool, or Cold.

Will changing tiers re-upload my data? No. A tier change is a property change on the blob in place. Nothing is downloaded or re-uploaded, so there is no egress cost for the change itself.

Get Blober

Blober is a one-time purchase. No subscriptions. No transfer fees. No transfer limits.

Download Blober at blober.io

Articles

Where to Put Terabytes of GoPro Footage

The Options at a Glance

Backblaze B2: The Best Default

Wasabi: No Egress Math

Cloudflare R2: Zero Egress for Public Footage

Local Drive or NAS: Cheapest Over Years

The 3-2-1 Setup for Footage You Cannot Re-Shoot

How Blober Gets Your Footage There

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Guides

Get Blober

What Cloudinary Is

How the Credit Model Works

The Tiers

Where Cloudinary Wins

Where It Doesn't Fit

Cloudinary vs Alternatives

Using Cloudinary with Blober

The Privacy-First Cloud Storage That's Hard to Move Files Into

Where Proton Drive Is Officially Supported

What The Proton Client Does Well (And What It Doesn't)

What About rclone?

How Blober Handles Proton Drive Differently

You Just Log In. Normally.

What Blober Supports With Proton Drive

What Blober Does That Proton's Client Can't

The Migration Scenario

Blober vs rclone for Proton Drive: Side by Side

Who This Is For

Using Proton Drive with Blober

What Rabata Actually Is

What the Benchmarks Show

The Real Use Case

Where It Doesn't Fit

Where It Sits Competitively

Using Rabata with Blober

Azure Storage Tiers and the Problem with Managing Them

Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive: The Tiers at a Glance

What Blober Does Differently

Storage Tier Changes

Container Access Level Changes

A Real Example: Post-Production Archival

More Mutations Coming

Setting Up Azure Blob Storage in Blober

Configuration Options

Who Needs This

Common Questions About Azure Blob Tiers

Get Blober