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System Design Masterclass · Database Types Storage
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Every regulated industry has a version of this problem. Banks must keep transaction records for seven years. Healthcare providers must retain patient records for a decade or more. Media companies sit on petabytes of raw footage that might. might, be needed for a re-release twenty years from now.
You cannot delete this data. But you also cannot afford to store it on production-ready hardware. At enterprise scale, we're talking about petabytes, and the difference between standard storage and archive storage is the difference between a $50,000/month bill and a $2,000/month bill.
Archive storage is the basement of the storage hierarchy. It's where data goes when the only question left is: "Do we legally have to keep this?" If the answer is yes, archive storage keeps it alive at the absolute minimum cost.
Archive storage is often confused with cold storage, but they serve different use cases:
| Dimension | Cold Storage | Archive Storage |
|---|---|---|
| Retrieval time | Minutes to hours | Hours to days |
| Cost per GB | ~$0.004/month | ~$0.001/month |
| Retrieval cost | Moderate | High |
| Minimum storage duration | 90 days typical | 180 days typical |
| Use case | Infrequent but predictable access | Compliance, legal hold, "keep forever" |
The critical distinction: archive storage assumes you will almost never retrieve data. The pricing model penalizes retrieval heavily, early deletion fees, per-GB retrieval charges, and long restore times all discourage casual reads.
Major archive storage services:
Some organizations still use tape storage, yes, magnetic tape. It sounds archaic, but tape offers the lowest per-GB cost of any medium and can last 30+ years. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN stores over 1 exabyte of data on tape.