We have a set of pre-computed sample files (GB-range in size), in an Azure File Share (Premium/NFS). These files are only used for brief periods at a time (during release cycles of an application, which consumes these files via NFS). Retaining the full-scale share while the files are not actively being used, is turning out to be costly.
Is there a way to place the content of a file share in a low-cost cold/"archived" state (similar to Glacier in AWS S3, or EBS snapshots in EC2), and restore them into a hot/"live" state when required later in time?
Azure Files offers a "snapshot" functionality, but it does not seem to address my requirement; basically a snapshot seems to be tightly coupled to the original file share, and gets deleted when the share is deleted - making it impossible to be used for backup/archival.
One option might be to move the files into a lower-cost storage solution (e.g. create an Azure Disk, move files there, and take a disk snapshot) and restore them into a new empty share during next usage cycle; but it seems like too much work for such a trivial requirement.
(Also curious to know, whether such a solution exists for non-Premium/non-NFS (StorageV2/SMB) file shares at least.)
