I only ever use the storage explorer when managing my blobs, files, queues within storage accounts. It is your single view access point for all your storage needs and I totally recommend downloading it and using it (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/features/storage-explorer/).

Why do I like using it? I am sure there are more reasons, but these are personal to me.

• Easy to connect to multiple subscriptions.
• Easy to view, delete and copy objects.
• Easy to generate SAS and get storage keys.
• Very helpful that you can drag folders across to the account from local file systems which could contain sub folders with thousands of files.
• Can be used across windows, Linux and MacOS

Let’s download, install and connect to an account.

Under account management you will want to add an account.

Sign into your account.

Once logged in you will have a have plenty of information at your fingertips.

As I mentioned earlier one advantage is the ease of generating a SAS, which I will do for the backups container.

All you need to do it right click and get SAS.

Configure the permissions and start / expiry dates as required.

In the next post I will look into shared access signatures with a little more depth.