As you may know, there have been some changes going on for Windows Azure. One of those changes has been related to Affinity.
Windows Azure production applications and storage will no longer be supported in the ‘USA-Northwest’ region. We will be deleting all Windows Azure applications and storage accounts in the “USA - Northwest” region on October 31st.
To move your application/storage, first delete the project using the “Delete Service” button. Then recreate it, choosing the “USA - Southwest” region. (It may take a few minutes for your previous application and storage account names to become available again.)
I've been meaning to write a couple of utilities for backing up blobs and storage and this is just the impetus to do so. Point your favorite SVN tool to http://reluctantdba.svn.beanstalkapp.com/demonstrations/trunk/AzureCommands and download the latest and greatest set. There's two new programs, AzureBlobLoader and AzureBlobRetriever. The first utility, AzureBlobLoader, will load a directory and sub directories and files as blobs into the container of your choice. AzureBlobRetriever, on the other hand, downloads blobs to your hard drive. It does not, however, keep any metadata associated with the blob.
Also, though it will be later this week, I've been developing a Facebook Application using Windows Azure and that has taught me some valuable lessons that I'll share.
And we'll have a couple of Table Storage utilities here soon as well.