Point it at your photos and walk away.
ColdStorage archives your Photos library and the folders you'd hate to lose — encrypted on your Mac, kept somewhere else entirely, and shown to you plainly so you can see it worked.
Free app · storage from $9.99 a year — $0.83 a month
Four steps, one of them honest to a fault
Step four is the part most storage products keep in the fine print. We'd rather you read it now than meet it later.
Pick your Photos library and the folders you'd hate to lose — or drag them in. It works like copying to a drive: no per-upload meter, no decisions.
Everything is encrypted on your Mac before it leaves, then archived to deep storage somewhere else entirely. Newest photos go first, so the things you'd miss most are safe soonest.
Your whole archive stays browsable — file tree and thumbnails, instantly, without touching cold storage. Proof of safety you can look at.
A restore isn't instant — it's a recovery. Pick what you need, see the exact cost and ready-time, and nothing starts until you say go. Most people restore a folder, not the library.
Private, stated precisely
Privacy claims tend to inflate. Ours match the architecture — what it does today, not what it might do someday. Your files are scrambled on your Mac before they leave it, so what's stored is data nobody can read.
One more honest detail: today we hold your key — as escrow, so recovery works when you need it. It's audit-logged, only ever used with your say-so, and we're moving it onto your device alone.
Buy a stretch of years
Pick a size, pick how long to lock it — like buying a drive, you own the span up front. Every tier is the whole product. The only difference is room.
A longer term isn't a discount — it's a rate lock. Every term is exactly that many years at today's rate, and if our costs rise mid-term, we absorb the difference until your term ends.
Bigger tiers cost slightly less per GB because one account is cheaper for us to run than two — we pass that back. It's the only discount in the model.
Asked before you had to ask
In Amazon's S3 Glacier Deep Archive — the industrial vault big companies use for the things they keep for decades. We're the simple, private layer on top: your files are scrambled on your Mac before they leave it, so what sits in that vault is data nobody can read.
No — those sync your working files and read them along the way. ColdStorage works like a drive you keep somewhere else: what you put is what's there, with no versioning. Putting things in feels like copying to an SSD. Getting things out is a recovery — a short wait and a quoted fee, shown before you commit.
Because pulling data out of deep storage has a real cost, and we pass it through at the raw rate we're charged — no markup. Most recoveries are small: a folder runs about fifty cents. Pulling back a full 500 GB archive at once is about $46. Either way you see the exact number first, and nothing's charged until you say go.
Nothing dramatic. Your archive goes read-only — untouched and browsable, with nothing new going in. You get about six months of grace and clear reminders, then a final warning long before anything is touched. We never delete over a lapsed card.
Deep storage bills a 180-day minimum per file, so something you delete on day 10 still bills out the rest of that window. Delete freely — it's your drive — we just want you to know how the meter runs before it matters.
If we ever wind down, you get at least six months' notice to take your archive elsewhere before anything is deleted. It's a commitment we publish and stand behind: your archive shouldn't vanish because our company did.
Put what you can't lose somewhere else
Download the app, point it at what matters, and walk away. We'll take it from here.
Free app · macOS 14 or later · storage from $9.99 a year