How temporary is Azure VM Temporary Storage?

Question

When you create an Azure VM, it creates a D: drive named \"Temporary Storage\". It\'s unclear to me just how temporary this is though. Is it reset between reboots, start/stop,

Answer 1

This disk is a local disk, non-replicated. If it crashes, anything on it is gone. If your VM is moved to another server, the content is gone. If you scale a VM size down, it's likely this data will be gone, as the allocation size decreases.

As for use cases: Think about database servers that need a scratch disk. Or maybe your workflow involves grabbing content from a blob, processing it, then shipping it off somewhere (e.g. photo/video/audio processing). You could download to temporary storage, do all of your transform work on that disk, then pick up the results, saving the final file somewhere durable. Temp storage use is really open-ended - it's really up to you how you use it; just realize that it's not durable storage (unlike your VHD, which is in durable storage).