Why “trust us” is not an archive
A studio closing a project, a firm keeping a production for years, a broadcaster with a decade of masters: all pay to keep data they rarely open, on the provider’s word that it is still intact. The failure is found at restore time, which is the one moment it cannot be fixed.
Proof-of-storage changes the question from “do you trust the provider” to “show me”. Decentralised storage produces a cryptographic proof, at intervals, that a specific piece of data is still being held as agreed. Boita records that proof on the file record for each archived item, so the evidence that a close-out archive still exists is something you can see, not something you were told.
How the archive tier works
The archive is a cold tier for data that will not change: aged deliveries and close-out sets that must be kept but are rarely opened. Scale and above can already archive finished folders with a manifest and restore on demand; the decentralised backend with proof-of-storage is what is coming. A worker moves them out of hot storage to the archive, records the storage reference and the proof-of-storage on each file, and the file stays visible in your Drive with its size and the checksum the server recorded when it first arrived, so a restored copy can be verified against the original.
Restoring is on demand and not instant: the expected restore time is shown, and the files come back to hot storage, where they can be downloaded or shared at full speed. Workspaces that need India data residency get a domestic cold object-storage archive instead of decentralised storage, with the same restore flow.
Cold costs less than hot, and the trade is time
Hot storage on the transfer nodes is built for speed: transfers write into it at line rate and recipients download from it minutes later. Cold storage is built for price per terabyte, and the trade is time: a restore takes a while. That is why the archive is priced as a separate cold tier, so a workspace pays hot rates only for the data it is actively moving and a lower rate for what it is keeping.
Prices are not yet announced; the tier will be quoted on request alongside your plan.
Integrity anchoring, and what the archive is not
Delivery receipts, exported as PDF on Scale and above, list files, sizes, server-recorded checksums, timestamp and recipient. As an optional add-on for Scale and Enterprise workspaces, the hash of a receipt can be anchored on a public ledger, giving a tamper-evident record that a specific delivery existed at a specific time. It is an integrity feature, not a storage one; the files themselves never go on a ledger.
The archive tier is only ever a destination for cold data. Transfers never run through it: uploads, downloads, share links, portals and watch folders all work against hot storage, at line rate, as they do today. Deletion on decentralised storage takes effect when the storage agreement expires rather than immediately, which is one reason India-residency workspaces get a domestic archive.
- Cold tier for aged deliveries; coming, available on request
- Proof-of-storage recorded on every archived file
- Restore on demand with the restore time shown; domestic archive for India residency
- Receipt-hash anchoring as an optional integrity add-on on Scale and Enterprise
- Never part of the transfer path; priced separately