Cold storage
Cold storage is the archive tier — cheap to keep, slower and metered to retrieve. Pick this when you almost never read the data: long-tail backups, compliance retention, raw logs for audits.
What you pay for
Three cost components, all metered separately:
| Item | Rate | When you pay |
|---|---|---|
| Storage | $0.004/GB-month | Continuously while the archive exists |
| Retrieval | $0.02–$0.05/GB | Per restore request, varies by retrieval class |
| Early-deletion fee | per-GB × remaining days | If you delete before 90 days |
For comparison: Object Storage Standard is $0.013/GB-month (3.25× the rate) — and Object Standard has no retrieval fee or minimum-storage duration. The trade-off is: pay less to keep, more to read.
Minimum-storage duration
Every archive incurs a 90-day minimum storage charge. Delete an archive after 30 days, and you'll be billed for the remaining 60 days as part of the deletion. This is the same model AWS Glacier uses; it's what makes the storage rate this low.
In practice: don't churn cold-storage objects. The right pattern is write-once, keep-or-delete-after-90-days.
Retrieval classes
| Class | Latency | Per-GB cost | When to use |
|---|---|---|---|
expedited | 1–5 minutes | $0.05 | Compliance retrievals; one-off audits with a deadline |
standard | 3–5 hours | $0.02 | The default; cost-effective for unplanned reads |
bulk | 5–12 hours | $0.005 | Restoring tens-of-TB+ overnight |
A retrieval doesn't move data out of the archive permanently — it makes a temporary copy in Object Standard for 24 hours, accessible via a presigned URL. The archive itself is unchanged.
When NOT to use cold storage
- Anything you might read more than ~once a quarter — the retrieval fees overwhelm the storage savings.
- Anything time-sensitive on read — even
expeditedretrieval is 1–5 minutes, not seconds. - Data with a known short lifecycle — the 90-day minimum makes churn expensive.
For all three cases, Object storage with the IA or Cold storage class is a better fit (lower retrieval fees, shorter or no minimum duration).
What's next
- Object storage — same product family, higher-frequency access patterns.
- Snapshots — VM and volume snapshots are stored on the cold tier by default.