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A durable, secure storage space to archive your data in the long-term

Get long-term data archiving in a secure, resilient space, then retrieve it on demand when you need it. You can archive the very highest volumes of data — up to several petabytes. Get our most cost-effective storage solution, and the best prices on the market for archiving your data.

Our Cold Archive solution is powered by tape storage in a highly resilient, multi-datacentre architecture. Maintain control of your data by archiving it on a trusted platform, which guarantees confidentiality.

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Resilience and security

Your data is protected with erasure coding, and distributed within a highly redundant architecture, present in four of our datacentres in France. Since our datacentres are at least 100 kilometres apart, your archive is guaranteed availability in the event of an incident or unavailability — even if up to 2 datacentres go down.

Fully managed by OVHcloud

In just a few clicks, you can archive your data from an Object Storage container to an IBM Enterprise 3592 tape infrastructure. This archiving process is orchestrated by the Miria orchestrator, from Atempo — so you don’t have to worry about the hassle of managing and maintaining the infrastructure.

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Transparent and competitive pricing

Our pricing model is predictable: you know in advance what you will pay each month. By archiving your data with OVHcloud, you get the best prices on the market.

Use cases

Long-term data storage

In some sectors — such as healthcare and banking, or for public institutions — business or legal constraints require data to be stored for very long periods of time (several years or decades). Cold Archive addresses archiving requirements for massive volumes of cold data, which does not need to be accessed frequently (e.g., 1 or 2 restores per year, maximum).

A high resilience strategy

Adopt a 3-2-1 backup strategy to ensure optimal data protection: multiple identical backups on different storage media, including at least one that is kept in a separate location. With the Cold Archive solution, you can store this copy off-site and offline, making it inaccessible to cyberattacks.

Robust storage

Magnetic tapes are built to last for several decades (unlike an average of five years for modern disks). Cartridges only use power in read and write phases, which results in over 95% less power usage compared to a similar array.

How to

1

Create a standard Object Storage container from an S3 endpoint, and upload your data to it (data storage space) via the S3 APIs.

2

Archive your container data to tape libraries. Then manage the lifecycle of your archives via S3 APIs — e.g., archiving, restoring, deleting, etc.

3

Monitor your archives daily through an S3 API — list the archives, their contents, and their status.

Documentation and guides

Get started

Need help getting started? Find out how to manage the Cold Archive solution for your Public Cloud project.

Use the S3 APIs

Find out how to use the S3 APIs for archiving and restoring your data in our Cold Archive solution.

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Features

Scalability

There’s no need to provision storage space — you can archive all file types with Cold Archive, without having to worry about disk space.

Immutability

When the container is archived, data and metadata can no longer be modified. This means the data you archive is protected.

Large-scale archive space

You can archive 100 containers per project, each of which can reach up to 100TB of storage.

Data encryption

With Object Storage, your data is secured via encrypted write mode. This means the data is already encrypted when it is archived to magnetic tapes.

Large-scale archives

Store files of varying sizes, from small objects to large files.

Checksum

A Blake3 signature is automatically included in object metadata. This is to ensure the integrity of the objects being transferred.

S3 credential generation

Generate specific credentials for the S3 API. Using the credentials, simply modify the endpoints in your application to harness full compatibility.

Tags

Add tags to your objects or containers to categorise your storage. Each of these tags is associated with a key-value pair.

Pricing Public Cloud

Cold Archive billing

Object Storage and archiving are charged per GB, per hour. The displayed price indicates the cost of a full month of storage. Outgoing traffic from objects is also charged per GB. Each data restore request is billed per terabyte restored. A 6-month commitment is required for a container to be archived.

FAQ - Your questions answered

What is data archiving?

Just like paper documents, digital data needs to be stored somewhere. However, certain types of data do not need to be accessible at all times. This means they can be archived. Archiving is done on services equipped with robust technologies that are designed to last.

What are the differences between the Cloud Archive and Cold Archive solutions?

The Cold Archive solution is designed for very long-term archiving requirements (years, even decades), and is based on a magnetic tape architecture. Data restoration is limited to 1 or 2 times per year. The Cloud Archive solution offers medium-term storage, limiting data access to once per month. This type of service is suitable for backups, for example.

What are the differences between Cold Archive and Object Storage?

With Cold Archive, the user must create an Object Storage container on a dedicated S3 endpoint before archiving data to tape. It can then be restored if necessary. The purpose of this solution is to archive cold data.

The Object Storage range is an unstructured data storage space for information that must be accessed regularly by users or applications. This storage type is known as hot or warm data storage.

How long does it take to request a restore of my data?

The time it takes to restore data depends on the volume of data that must be restored. It takes an average of 48 hours to restore several hundred terabytes. For volumes ranging from a few megabytes to a terabyte, restoration time can vary from a few minutes to several hours.

What Service Level Agreement (SLA) does OVHcloud guarantee for access to the Cold Archive service?

The SLA guarantees 99.90% monthly availability for accessing the Cold Archive service. The data resilience rate is 99.99%.

What is cold storage?

Cold storage refers to the storage of data that does not need to be accessed regularly. It’s often archive data that a company still needs to store, such as old contracts, invoices, etc. With this solution, you get a cold, long-term storage service with technologies that guarantee integrity for your data.

Where is the cold data stored?

Cold data is stored on magnetic tapes — a specially adapted technology for long-term data storage. The advantage of low-power storage is that it is more economical than standard storage. Services like Cold Archive also offer features that make archiving easier, as well as boosting the resilience and security required for data that is still essential to users.

What is the difference between hot and cold data?

Not all data is equally important, or useful on a day-to-day basis. There are two main types: hot data and cold data.

Hot data is information that is requested and used on a regular basis. Customer-related information and documents used daily by employees are hot data.

In contrast, cold data is information that does not need to be accessed often. They are sometimes simply kept for legal purposes, with no other use for the company. For example, outdated financial data or old contracts are cold data.