Transferring all data from one subscription to another

Question

How do I transfer my all of my cloud services, databases, virtual machines and blob storage to another subscription that I newly subscribed to? Is there a simpler way?

Answer 1

UPDATE: 6-JUN-2016 - THIS ANSWER IS FAIRLY OLD. ONE MUST REACH OUT TO AZURE SUPPORT FOR TRANSFERRING DATA FROM ONE SUBSCRIPTION TO OTHER. ALSO AZURE PORTAL NOW SUPPORTS MOVING SERVICES FROM ONE SUBSCRIPTION TO ANOTHER

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There're a few (actually a lot :)) things here. You could try contacting Windows Azure Support and have them move it but I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Only other option left would be to manually transfer all the assets. However please keep in mind that this would mean your services will be down for certain amount of time.

1. Cloud Services - Since a cloud service is essentially a placeholder for your applications, you would need to delete them 1st from the 1st subscription (source) and then recreate them in the 2nd subscription (target). Once you have created them in the target subscription, you can republish/redeploy your applications.

2. Databases - Do take a look at Copy Database functionality (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ff951624.aspx) and Import/Export SQL Azure Databases (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh335292.aspx) available in Windows Azure. I have tried it to create copies

3. Virtual Machines - Essentially Virtual Machines are backed by blob storage i.e. all the VHDs for your VMs are stored as page blobs in blob storage. Do take a look at this blog post for moving VMs from one subscription to another: http://gauravmantri.com/2012/07/04/how-to-move-windows-azure-virtual-machines-from-one-subscription-to-another/

4. Blob Storage - With the latest release, copy blob functionality is a server side asynchronous operation. What that means is that you could copy blobs from one storage account to another without downloading them on your computer first. The idea is to list blob containers and blobs in source and then iterate over them and repeatedly call copy blob functionality to copy the blobs. The blog post above has a sample console application which copies a blob from one storage account to another which you can use as reference. The only catch here is that the target storage account must be created on or after 7th June 2012. You may find following links useful as well: http://blog.elastacloud.com/2012/07/04/copying-azure-blobs-from-one-subscription-to-another-with-api-1-7-1/ and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/06/12/introducing-asynchronous-cross-account-copy-blob.aspx

Hope this helps.