blob storage capacity

Question

blob storage capacity

Vijaya Kumar Bolisetti 0

Storage account mbgdpdatalakeprod occupied 40 TB and we want to know why and how to prevent this?

Praveen Bandaru 11,800 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-07T08:19:23.9933333+00:00
Hello **Vijaya Kumar Bolisetti
**Thanks for reaching out about storage usage in the mbgdpdatalakeprod storage account. We understand it is currently using about 40 TB of capacity, and you want to determine what is driving the growth and how to avoid additional unnecessary usage.

For a deeper review, we recommend checking the account's capacity metrics, growth patterns, and how data is distributed across containers.

You can find the information on the storage account metrics level below. Just use the filters below to check the capacity usage and bandwidth usage on the storage account. Please try to check the below screen shot to find the bandwidth information.

Elevated usage is often tied to large-scale data ingestion, blob versioning, snapshots, soft-deleted blobs, retained deleted data, change feed data, or backup and replication activity.

Blob versioning and soft delete can also increase storage consumption over time, since older versions and deleted objects continue to occupy space until they are permanently removed.

As a preventive step, you may want to use Azure Blob Lifecycle Management policies to move older data to cooler tiers (Cool, Cold, or Archive) and remove obsolete blobs, snapshots, or previous versions according to your retention requirements. This can help reduce both storage usage and cost.

Check the below reference document:

Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management overview

Hope the above answer helps! Please let us know do you have any further queries.

Please do consider to “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.

2 answers

Your answer

Praveen Bandaru 11,800 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-07T08:19:23.9933333+00:00

Hello **Vijaya Kumar Bolisetti
**Thanks for reaching out about storage usage in the mbgdpdatalakeprod storage account. We understand it is currently using about 40 TB of capacity, and you want to determine what is driving the growth and how to avoid additional unnecessary usage.

For a deeper review, we recommend checking the account's capacity metrics, growth patterns, and how data is distributed across containers.

You can find the information on the storage account metrics level below. Just use the filters below to check the capacity usage and bandwidth usage on the storage account. Please try to check the below screen shot to find the bandwidth information.

Elevated usage is often tied to large-scale data ingestion, blob versioning, snapshots, soft-deleted blobs, retained deleted data, change feed data, or backup and replication activity.

Blob versioning and soft delete can also increase storage consumption over time, since older versions and deleted objects continue to occupy space until they are permanently removed.

As a preventive step, you may want to use Azure Blob Lifecycle Management policies to move older data to cooler tiers (Cool, Cold, or Archive) and remove obsolete blobs, snapshots, or previous versions according to your retention requirements. This can help reduce both storage usage and cost.

Check the below reference document:

Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management overview

Hope the above answer helps! Please let us know do you have any further queries.

Please do consider to “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.

Answer 1

To find why the storage account is using 40 TB and reduce future growth, start by separating capacity usage from transaction activity.

In Azure Monitor → Storage Insights, review the account’s used capacity and transactions.
- Sort by Account used capacity on the Capacity tab to confirm how large the account is compared to others.
- Sort by Transactions to see whether the account is actively used or mostly idle.
Drill into the account in Storage Insights.
- Check Transactions by service type to see whether Blob Storage is the main source of activity.
- Check Transactions by API name to understand what operations are happening. If activity is mostly listing operations or account property requests and there are few read/write transactions, that can indicate the account is not being used significantly even though it still holds data.
Inspect what data is consuming the space.
- Use Storage Explorer to examine the blobs associated with the used capacity.
- If there are a large number of blobs, generate a report by using a Blob Inventory policy. This helps identify which blobs, containers, or data sets are occupying most of the 40 TB.
To prevent future unexpected growth, monitor usage trends regularly.
- Use Storage Insights as the ongoing dashboard for transaction volume and used capacity.
- Review whether the account has low business value but high retained data, which can indicate old data that should be archived, moved, or retired.
If the concern is also cost growth, review the billing drivers.
- Storage charges can come from data capacity, read/write operations, and optional features.
- In Subscription → Cost Analysis, use Cost by Resource and expand the Storage Account resource to identify which meter is driving the increase.
- After identifying the meter, enable Diagnostic Settings (Classic) on the storage account to investigate the source of operations, including source IP address and source URL.

The practical path is:

Use Storage Insights to confirm whether the 40 TB is from retained blob data or active workload growth.
Use Storage Explorer or Blob Inventory to identify exactly which blobs are consuming capacity.
Use Cost Analysis and diagnostics if the issue includes rising charges, so the growth can be tied to capacity or operations.

References:

Answer 2

Hi @Vijaya Kumar Bolisetti

I would first investigate the storage usage to understand what is causing the 40 TB consumption in the mbgdpdatalakeprod storage account.

A good starting point would be to review the storage account metrics and identify which containers and directories are using the most space. From there, check the data growth pattern and the last modified dates of the files to determine whether this is expected growth or unexpected data accumulation.

I would also review the workloads that write data into this Data Lake, such as Azure Data Factory, Synapse Analytics, Databricks, or other applications. In many cases, the root cause is a pipeline continuously generating new files, duplicate data being stored, or temporary/staging data that is not being cleaned up.

Once the source of the growth is identified, the remediation depends on the data type. For example, older data that still needs to be retained can be moved to Cool or Archive storage using Lifecycle Management policies, while unnecessary temporary or obsolete data can be removed based on the retention requirements.

To prevent similar situations in the future, I would recommend configuring Azure Monitor alerts for storage growth, reviewing retention policies, and ensuring that each dataset has a defined owner and lifecycle.

The main objective is to identify which process is generating the data and apply the appropriate retention and monitoring controls rather than only increasing storage capacity.