Video backup to Azure Storage account

At api.video we understand that sometimes, you want to make sure that your videos are safe and secure. Although api.video has a backup and disaster recovery plan, it’s up to you to decide if you want an extra backup resource or if you would like to use api.video just to transcode your videos but eventually store them on a different resource.

That’s why, we’ve created this guide so you can store the videos you’ve already transcoded with api.video on a file storage resource.

How it’s done?

This guide will explain how you can store your transcoded videos on Azure Storage Account. In short, all you need to do is run a small script that will copy the videos from api.video to Azure. The videos will be kept on api.video as well, however, if you wish to delete them you can do so by leveraging the DELETE /videos endpoint, more information can be found here.

Preparation

What we will need to run the script?

  1. api.video API key, you can find the information on how to retrieve the API key in the Retrieve your api.video API key guide
  2. Azure Account Key, or use any other credential system that Azure provides
  3. Azure storage account name
  4. api.video Cold Storage script,
  5. Node.js and npm, you can find the installation instructions here
  6. Typescript, you can find the installation instructions here

Getting the Azure Storage Account name

  • Navigate to your Azure portal
  • Click on Storage Account
  • You’ll find the Storage Account in the list

Getting Started

After you’ve got all the keys and installed node.js, npm and typescript, you can proceed with cloning the script from GitHub.

Cloning the Cold Storage script

  1. In the command line enter the following
$ git clone https://github.com/apivideo/backup-cold-storage
  1. Once the script is cloned, you can navigate the script directory
$ cd backup-cold-storage

Setting up the script

Once you are in the script directory, install the dependencies

$ npm install

After the dependencies are installed, we will need to enter the credentials we have copied in the preparation phase.

Edit the .env file and replace the following with the keys you've received from Azure and api.video.

# possible providers: google, aws, azure
PROVIDER = "azure"

# api.video API key
APIVIDEO_API_KEY = "api_video_api_key"

# the name of the bucket on Google Amazon S3 or the container on Azure Storage
SPACE_NAME = "azure_container_name"

# Azure credentials
AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY = "azure_account_key"
AZURE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME = "azure_storage_account_name"

Don’t forget to save the file.

Running the backup

Once you've got all the keys in place in the .env file, it's time to run the script. As we are running the script on TypeScript, we will need to build it first, hence, the first command you need to run in the script folder is:

$ npm run build

After the script was built, it’s time to run it:

$ npm run backup

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