title: Umbraco Examine indexes disappearing on Azure
body: <p>I've been having an issue on an Umbraco 7.5.6 site hosted in an App Service on Azure where the indexes seem to be dropped after an unspecific amount of time. </p>
  
  <p>We're storing information, including some custom fields, on published news articles in the External Examine index to query stories from the index. This is consumed by our client-facing search API.</p>
  
  <p>Initially, we thought that this might be caused by Azure swapping servers so removed the {computerName} parameter from the path under ExamineSettings.config. However, that didn't appear to have any effect.</p>
  
  <p>Our current index path is <code>~/App_Data/TEMP/ExamineIndexes/External/</code></p>
  
  <p>The <code>ExamineSettings.config</code> file is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;Examine&gt;
  &lt;ExamineIndexProviders&gt;
  &lt;providers&gt;
    &lt;add name="InternalIndexer" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoContentIndexer, UmbracoExamine"
         supportUnpublished="true"
         supportProtected="true"
         analyzer="Lucene.Net.Analysis.WhitespaceAnalyzer, Lucene.Net"/&gt;
  
    &lt;add name="InternalMemberIndexer" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoMemberIndexer, UmbracoExamine"
         supportUnpublished="true"
         supportProtected="true"
         analyzer="Lucene.Net.Analysis.Standard.StandardAnalyzer, Lucene.Net"/&gt;
  
      &lt;!-- default external indexer, which excludes protected and unpublished pages--&gt;
      &lt;add name="ExternalIndexer" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoContentIndexer, UmbracoExamine"/&gt;
  
  &lt;/providers&gt;
  &lt;/ExamineIndexProviders&gt;
  
  &lt;ExamineSearchProviders defaultProvider="ExternalSearcher"&gt;
  &lt;providers&gt;
    &lt;add name="InternalSearcher" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoExamineSearcher, UmbracoExamine"
         analyzer="Lucene.Net.Analysis.WhitespaceAnalyzer, Lucene.Net"/&gt;
  
    &lt;add name="ExternalSearcher" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoExamineSearcher, UmbracoExamine" /&gt;
  
    &lt;add name="InternalMemberSearcher" type="UmbracoExamine.UmbracoExamineSearcher, UmbracoExamine"
         analyzer="Lucene.Net.Analysis.Standard.StandardAnalyzer, Lucene.Net" enableLeadingWildcard="true"/&gt;
  
  &lt;/providers&gt;
  &lt;/ExamineSearchProviders&gt;
  
  &lt;/Examine&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Due to the unpredictable nature of this issue, short of writing a WebJob to republish the articles on a regular basis, I'm unsure of what to try next.</p>