Storage Account Upgrade: LRS to GRS — Conversion Failure During Background Process

Question

Storage Account Upgrade: LRS to GRS — Conversion Failure During Background Process

Gordon Blackwell 40

Problem description

I am experiencing an issue when trying to upgrade my storage account from Standard_LRS to Standard_GRS. The request was accepted and entered an 'InProgress' state, but later failed during the background conversion process. The account remains operational and still shows Standard_LRS, but I want to successfully complete the upgrade to GRS.

Environment

Storage Account Management in the East US region.

What I've already tried

I reviewed the activity logs and resource health, confirmed that no management locks are in place, and verified that the account property 'isSkuConversionBlocked' is false. I also checked other accounts in the same resource group and region, which are still on Standard_LRS. No alerts or outages were identified during the conversion window.

Current status

I am seeking guidance on understanding the root cause of the conversion failure and steps I can take to successfully upgrade my storage account to GRS.

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1 answer

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Answer 1

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A!

@Gordon Blackwell I hope you are doing well

When converting from Standard_LRS to Standard_GRS, the request initially enters an InProgress state while Azure sets up background replication to the paired secondary region (West US). When this process fails silently and reverts back to LRS, it is typically caused by feature incompatibilities or data tier restrictions rather than platform outages.

Here are the most common causes and how to address them:

Blobs in the Archive Tier

The background replication engine cannot process blobs currently stored in the Archive tier. Check your containers; if any archived blobs exist, rehydrate them to Hot, Cool, or Cold before re-attempting the conversion.

Incompatible Account Features

Certain capabilities conflict with background geo-replication. Ensure the account does not have active Object Replication rules, NFS 3.0 protocol enabled, or Internet Routing Preference configured under Networking (it must be set to Microsoft Network Routing).

Heavy Data Volume or Workload Timeouts

If the account contains large amounts of data or millions of small objects undergoing continuous write operations, the background synchronization can time out. In these scenarios, creating a new storage account provisioned directly as Standard_GRS and copying the data over using a migration tool like AzCopy is often the most reliable path.

References:

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