Azure Temp Drive for General Storage

Micah McKittrick 946 Reputation points Microsoft Employee
2019-10-29T20:00:37.183+00:00

Can I use the temporary disk (the D: drive by default) to store data?

Sourced from MSDN

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  1. olufemia-MSFT 2,861 Reputation points
    2019-10-29T20:24:21.73+00:00

    Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A (Preview) platform. Happy to answer your question.

    Don’t use the temporary disk to store data. It is only temporary storage, so you would risk losing data that can’t be recovered. Data loss can occur when the virtual machine moves to a different host. Resizing a virtual machine, updating the host, or a hardware failure on the host are some of the reasons a virtual machine might move.
    If you have an application that needs to use the D: drive letter, you can reassign drive letters so that the temporary disk uses something other than D:. For instructions, see Change the drive letter of the Windows temporary disk.

    Sourced from MSDN

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  1. Nicholas Manolakos 6 Reputation points
    2019-11-19T11:23:17.793+00:00

    You can create a new storage for the vm and use it for a data disk. You’ll have to go into the vm and mount the new disk. For the drive letter you can swap it out via looking for Disk Management settings. This way the disk will be permanent. Additionally you might want to back up the storage separately

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  2. Bala C 1 Reputation point
    2019-11-20T17:04:45.167+00:00

    If you use Temp Storage ( Windows D drive and Unix /mnt) after the reboot of the server data will be lost. It's better to assign one additional data disks and mount the drive inside the server.

    So your data will be safe. Also temp storage will not be part of Azure Backup. So your data not possible to recover if you keep in temp storage.

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  3. Saurabh Dhande 21 Reputation points
    2020-12-16T07:29:53.933+00:00

    The D: drive in windows VMs is temporary storage drive and the drive itself contains a txt file basically a warning txt file stating 'data in the drive will be lost'. after reboot or shutdown on the VM.

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  4. Purna Rao 26 Reputation points
    2021-11-11T18:35:40.4+00:00

    @Micah McKittrick - Temporary drive (D: drive) is non persistent drive used by Azure. If you have need to to use for temporary base you can use that. In some use cases like deploying some application binaries to, you can download package (zip) to temporary drive and extract to the actual application location (C: drive or F: drive). After few days, if VM gets moved to different host within Azure data center or MS pushes some updates to VM's the data in D: drive would get lost

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