Long-Term Archive & Records Retention Storage

Tape remains the lowest cost per terabyte at rest and the only tier where the media is genuinely offline between accesses, which matters for a class of risk that disk cannot address. The trade is access latency and a real operational burden — cartridges, a library or autoloader, drive cleaning, and a generation cadence that forces a migration every few years whether you planned one or not.

Disk-based archive is the middle answer: slower and denser than a primary tier, immediately accessible, and administratively simpler. It suits retention measured in a handful of years, and it suits organizations without the staff to operate a tape estate — which is most of them.

Object-storage targets sit alongside backup platforms and are increasingly where retention copies actually land. They are quotable as appliances and licensing; whether they satisfy your retention requirement is a question for your records office and your counsel, not for a supplier.

The retention schedule is a records-management decision. What must be kept, for how long, under whose authority, and what happens at the end of the period are questions your records officer, your general counsel and — for a federal agency — your own disposition authority answer. No supplier can set them and no product satisfies them.

We therefore make no compliance promise about archive equipment. We will not tell you that a product makes a records program compliant, that a media type satisfies a statutory obligation, or that an appliance's retention feature constitutes a legal hold. What we will do is quote hardware sized to the schedule you give us, with the migration path stated, and record country of origin and §889 screening per line.