In my Release pipeline I have 4 stages. All 4 of these stages need the same artifacts from the build pipeline. The stages also need the same files that the stages retrieve from an Storage account in MS Azure.
Currently every stage starts with retrieving the artifacts from the build pipeline(This is by default) and downloading the files from the Storage Account. These retrieving and downloading steps take quite some time.
1 Can I share files somehow between stages so the number of download and retrieve tasks are reduced? What is the best approach for this? 2 Is it possible to turn of the automatic retrieval of build artifacts at the beginning of a release stage?
You're already doing it the correct way. Every stage has the possibility of running on a different agent (or definitely running on different agents, in parallel), so downloading the necessary artifacts at the start of the stage is a requirement, since there's no guarantee that all stages will run on the same agent, or that rerunning a stage (say, in the event of a failed deployment) will reuse the same agent.
Yes. You can use artifact filters on any phase of a release to limit or eliminate the artifacts that are downloaded.