About ColdStorage
ColdStorage is somewhere to put the photos and files you want to keep but don't need open all the time. It's a Mac app and a yearly plan.
Why we built it
Everyone ends up with a pile of things they can't bring themselves to delete — old photos, video from a trip, scans of documents, the folder from a job that ended years ago. The usual answer is a cloud drive, which charges you to keep all of it awake and instantly openable even though you'll open almost none of it. So people buy an external drive instead, and then the drive dies, or it doesn't die but nobody can remember which drive it was.
ColdStorage is the other option. Your files go into deep storage, which is slow to open and much cheaper to keep than storage that stays live and ready all the time. Getting something back takes about 48 hours.
We can't read your files
Files are encrypted on your Mac before they upload, and the key that opens them never comes to us. That's a design choice with a real cost attached: if you lose your recovery code and your Mac, nobody can open your files, and that includes us. We'd rather say so plainly than leave you to find out later.
How we make money
You pay for storage once a year, and that's the whole business. There are no ads, and there's nothing to learn from your files even if we wanted to, because we can't open them.
Pulling files back out is billed at what it costs us to move them, with nothing added on top.
What we won't do
We don't upload anything you didn't put in. macOS will hand an app access to your entire photo library if you let it, but we only take the files you actually drop in.
Who's behind it
ColdStorage is made by one person, in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.