Enterprise Administration > File Vaulting and Replication > File Vaulting > Working with External File Vaults > Configuring Windchill File Vaults to Use Azure Blobs > Transferring Data to Azure Blobs using Azure Data Box
  
Transferring Data to Azure Blobs using Azure Data Box
This section explains the steps to transfer the data into Azure Blob Container. Azure Data Box provides a secure, tamper-resistant method for quick and simple transfer of your Windchill on-premises data to Azure.
Transferring Data using Azure Data Box
Before You Begin
• Read the documentation available on Microsoft Azure site for step-by-step instructions on using the Azure Data Box.
• Create Storage account(s) on your Azure portal.
• Create a Container(s) within an Azure Storage account before copying the data.
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Under block blob and page blob shares, first level entities are containers, and second level entities are blobs. It is your responsibility to ensure that you copy the data to shares that correspond to the appropriate data format. For instance, copy the block blob data to the share for block blobs. If the data format does not match the appropriate share type, then at a later step, the data upload to Azure fails.
• The copy steps as follows require you to access your Azure portal, Windows server machine and Azure Data Box drive, as required.
Perform the following steps to copy data from a Windows Server host computer to Azure Blob Container using Azure Data Box:
1. Order Azure Data Box to your premises from Microsoft.
2. Once Azure Data Box is available, connect the power cable and network cables to Azure Data Box. For more details, refer to the documentation available on Microsoft Azure site.
3. Set up the Azure Data Box by following the instructions available from Microsoft Azure site. This configures Data Box network interfaces to enable access to Storage accounts of Azure Data Box.
4. If you wish to encrypt a Storage account, go to Storage Account > Encryption in your Azure portal.
a. Select the Use your own key check-box and select Enter key URI in the Encryption key section.
b. Enter the Key URI value and click Save.
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If you wish to use client side encryption, then migrate the content to Blob Storage and re-vault the content to client side encrypted vault. For more details, see the section “Writing Delegate Implementations for Client Side Encryption” in Encryption Customization for Azure Blob Storage Mounts.
5. Once the Data Box is configured, search for Data Box in services in your Azure portal.
6. Go to Device details in your Azure portal and provide credentials for all your Storage Accounts.
7. On your Windows machine, use the device details to check the Storage accounts.
8. Mount the Data Box drive from your Windows machine to the desired Azure Storage account by using Tools > Map network drive....
a. Provide the path of the Azure Storage account and other credentials from the Device details page from your Azure portal.
For example, if the Azure Storage account name is contentdataboxperfqa_blockBlob and the network interface has value 10.80.22.127 then the path is \\10.80.22.127\contentdataboxperfqa_blockBlob. Refer to Microsoft documentation for detailed instructions.
9. After mounting the drive, open the command prompt terminal from the drive and use the robocopy command to copy the data. The syntax is robocopy <Source> <Target> <Attribute>.
For example, if the source mount path is C:\PTC\Windchill\vaults\defaultuploadvault and the target mount path is contentdataboxperfqa_blockBlob/testcontainer/defaultuploadvault then the command is
robocopy C:\PTC\Windchill\vaults\defaultuploadvault contentdataboxperfqa_blockBlob/testcontainer/defaultuploadvault /e /MT:32
/e — Copies subdirectories including empty directories
/MT — Use multithreading, recommended 32 or 64 threads. This option is not used with encrypted files. You may need to separate encrypted and unencrypted files. However, single threaded copy significantly lowers the performance.
For more details on robocopy command, refer to Microsoft documentation.
10. Verify that the data is copied correctly.
11. From your Azure portal navigate to the Prepare to ship tab and click Start preparation.
The STATUS is updated to Ready to ship once the device preparation is complete.
12. Shut the device down and remove the cables. Follow instructions from Microsoft to ship Azure Data Box back to them.
13. Once the data is copied and you receive a confirmation from Microsoft, verify the data size within copy log path for each Azure Storage account.
14. Start the Windchill server and validate data using the wt.fv.tools.datamigration.DataMigrationVerificationTool. For more details, see the section “Validate the copied content” in Vault Migration to Azure Blob Storage.
15. Once the data is successfully validated, run the MountMigrationTool for each folder to change the mount path from file system based to Azure path. For more details, see the section “Update Mount” in Vault Migration to Azure Blob Storage.