Quick Note — Recommend a Solution for Migrating Unstructured Data
AZ-305 › Unit 4: Design infrastructure solutions › Design migrations › Recommend a solution for migrating unstructured data
Quick Note — Recommend a Solution for Migrating Unstructured Data
A large global media company plans to move 400 TB of video assets from on-prem storage to Azure for archive and distribution. The engineering manager runs the math: at the company's 1 Gbps internet link, the transfer would take days of continuous saturation — assuming no other traffic, no failures, and no contention. The architect intervenes: order an Azure Data Box Heavy (1 PB capacity), copy the data over the local network in a week, ship the appliance to Microsoft, and have the data online in Azure within 14 days. Cost for the appliance and shipping: a few thousand dollars.…
Retrieval target
- Recommend a Solution for Migrating Unstructured Data
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
Azure Data Box | Microsoft-shipped physical appliance for bulk offline data transfer to Azure. The standard size: 80 TB usable, ruggedised network-attached device. You request via portal, Microsoft ships it, you copy data over 10 GbE NAS / REST, ship it back, Microsoft uploads to your Storage account. Use when transferring more data than the network can move in a reasonable time. |
| Azure Data Box family: Disk, Box, Heavy | Data Box Disk — set of SSDs (8 GB to 8 TB / disk; up to 40 TB / order). Best for small / branch-office data. Data Box (the original) — 80 TB usable, ruggedised box, 10 GbE. The default. Data Box Heavy — 800 TB usable, palette-sized, 40 GbE. For PB-scale data centre evacuations. Pick by total volume + how the source can ingest the device (USB vs Ethernet). |
AzCopy | Microsoft's command-line tool for copying blobs and files between local FS / Azure Blob / Azure Files / AWS S3 / GCS. Multi-threaded, resumable, supports SAS tokens or AAD auth. The default tool for online bulk uploads up to a few TB when the network can handle it. Free, scriptable, cross-platform. |
Azure Storage Mover | A managed Azure service for agent-based, scheduled file-share migration. Deploy a Storage Mover agent VM in the source environment; it copies SMB / NFS shares to Azure Files / Blob over the network. Supports incremental sync for cutover. Replaces hand-rolled robocopy / rsync scripts with a managed control plane + progress reporting in the portal. |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.