Yesterday (14th September 2011) Windows Azure SDK 1.5 (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/09/14/just-announced-build-new-windows-azure-toolkit-for-windows-8-windows-azure-sdk-1-5-geo-replication-for-azure-storage-and-more.aspx) was announced with lots of new and important features. As you know that the development storage emulator which gets shipped with SDK makes use of a SQL Server database as storage engine.
With all the changes that are done in this release, one of the things that will happen is that when SDK 1.5 is installed, a new database (DevelopmentStorageDb20110816) is created (previously the data was stored in DevelopmentStorageDb20090919 database). What this means is that you will find your development storage account empty (i.e. no tables, blob containers and queues) after the installation of the new SDK. If you use development storage extensively for your development, this may cause some unexpected annoyance.
One possible way of circumventing this situation is to take a backup of your storage account before installing SDK and after installation of the SDK you can restore the storage account. You can possibly use our Azure Management Cmdlets (http://www.cerebrata.com/products/azure-management-cmdlets/introduction) to take a backup of your development storage account using Backup-StorageAccount cmdlet) and then restore it using Restore-StorageAccount cmdlet.
To summarize, if you wish to preserve your data:
- Before installation, take a backup of your storage data.
- Install SDK.
- Restore storage data.
Hope this helps.