Storage is the only meter

Hot vs cold storage for footage.
What re-hydration means, and what a year of work actually costs.

Every master you keep online forever is paid for forever. Cold storage is how a finished project stops costing hot-tier money without leaving the building. Here is how the two temperatures work here, the arithmetic for a real year of work, and how the same year prices out on tape and on the big clouds' archive tiers.

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Updated September 2026

Two temperatures, one library

Hot is what you are using;
cold is what you are keeping.

The distinction is not about safety. Both copies are the file you uploaded, encrypted at rest. The difference is what the file can do right now, and what you pay while it can.

Hot

The living library. Streams at full bitrate, embeds, opens in the review room, takes comments, ships to clients. Every byte is ready to play the moment someone clicks, with unlimited views. Priced for that readiness.

Cold

The archive. The master is stored, encrypted, at half the hot rate, and it does nothing else: no stream, no embed, no review, until you bring it back. The delivered master and the selects that made the cut: the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace.

Re-hydration

Moving a master from cold back to hot. A straight copy at your connection speed, size-verified on arrival, counted against a monthly allowance of twice your cold storage. No retrieval tiers, no waiting window, no per-request fee.

The rule of thumb

The film your clients click stays hot, as a 150 Mbps export. The master it was cut from and the selects that made the cut go cold the day it is delivered. Everything else you shot stays on your local disks and RAID.

The web dashboard moves masters up to 20 GB between the two. Anything larger moves through the macOS app, which streams the copy part by part, so a laptop that closes mid-transfer resumes rather than restarts. Archiving frees the hot space immediately; restoring counts against the month’s allowance the moment the copy is verified.

The arithmetic

One year of work,
hot, cold, and split.

Take a working shooter who finishes a project a month: a ProRes master of about 60 GB, a 150 Mbps viewing export of the same film at 11 GB, and 1.5 TB of camera rushes, of which the selects that made the cut are about 300 GB. Twelve of those is 720 GB of masters, 135 GB of exports, 3.6 TB of selects and 18 TB of rushes. The rushes already live on the local disks and RAID the edit ran from, the cheapest storage you own; the cloud’s job is the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace, plus the one file people click: 4.5 TB a year of exports, masters and selects. So the question is the temperature of that off-site set. A ProRes master in the hot library is a download, not a stream: browsers do not decode ProRes, so the file a client plays is the H.264 or HEVC export anyway.

Off-site set kept hot
Off-site set kept cold
The split (recommended)
Viewingexports(135 GB)
Hot
Cold: nothingstreams
Hot, on the plan:every film plays at 150 Mbps
ProResmasters(720 GB)
Hot: a download,not a stream
Cold
Cold
Selects thatmade the cut(3.6 TB)
Hot
Cold
Cold
All otherrushes(14.4 TB)
Local disksand RAID
Local disksand RAID
Local disksand RAID
Blocks pastthe plan
3 hot blocks past the1.5 TB included: $120 a month
4 cold blocks past the1 TB included: $80 a month
4 cold blocks past the1 TB included: $80 a month
Monthlyat year end(Max, $75)
$195
$155
$155
What stillstreams
Every film
Nothing untilre-hydrated
Every film,at 150 Mbps
Monthlyafter threeyears
$555:12 hot blocks
$335:13 cold blocks
$315: 12 cold blocks,hot still inside the plan
Re-hydrationheadroom
n/a
10 TB a month
10 TB a month

Every column keeps the full rushes on local disks and RAID; the columns differ only in the temperature of the off-site set, 4.5 TB a year of exports, masters and selects. Max plan, monthly: 1.5 TB hot and 1 TB cold included, then $40 per TB hot and $20 per TB cold a month, billed in whole terabytes. A ten-minute film: the ProRes 422 HQ master in UHD is about 55 GB at 24p (Apple's data-rate table gives 318 GB an hour), rounded to 60 GB here; the same film exported at 150 Mbps is 11 GB. Rushes assume about 1.5 TB per project, roughly five hours of ProRes 422 HQ in UHD or a couple of hours of camera RAW, with the selects that made the cut taken as a fifth of that; scale both to your codec and your shooting ratio. Re-hydration headroom is twice the cold pool, the included terabyte plus the blocks.

Two things the table hides. First, hot never stops growing: the same off-site set kept hot is buying twelve hot blocks by year three, $555 a month, while the split’s hot side is still 405 GB, inside the plan for a decade; its cold side grows by about 4.3 TB a year, roughly $85 a month more each year. Second, all-cold saves nothing over the split, and nothing plays: a client who asks for the link in month nine waits for a re-hydration. The split is the same cold bill with every film playing at a bitrate about seven times the 4K ceiling of the best streaming platforms, the master and the selects off-site for the day a re-edit is real, and the other fourteen terabytes where they already are, on the RAID.

Your own numbers

Size it from
what you shoot.

The same calculators as the pricing page. The hot side sizes what streams today and picks the plan; the cold side sizes the archive from your finals, with the rushes multiplier if you keep camera originals.

Hot / Live storage

How much unlimited streaming storage you need:

You need

45 GB

Your plan

Lite9 $/mo

Cold / Archive storage

How much archival/backup storage you need:

You need

45 GB

Keeping the full RAW rushes runs ~25×: 1.13 TB.

HOT — your living library: instant streaming, client review, shares. Every byte is ready to play, right now with unlimited views, no bandwidth limits.

COLD — the archive for finished projects or as cloud backup, encrypted at rest, at a lower cost. To review a master again, re-hydrate it from the app: the transfer runs at your connection speed (a 100 GB master ≈ 15 min on gigabit). Re-hydration allowance: 2× your cold storage per month.

When to move what

Selects go cold
the day the grade locks.

1

During the edit: cuts and versions hot, rushes on the RAID

Versions, review cuts, the review room. This is the month the file earns its rate. The camera originals stay on the local disks and RAID the edit runs from; they are never uploaded wholesale.

2

Grade locked: selects to cold

The selects that made the cut are the off-site copy, about a fifth of what was shot on most jobs. Move them to cold the day the grade is approved. The rest of the rushes stay on the RAID.

3

Delivered: a 150 Mbps export stays hot

Export the finished film at 100 to 200 Mbps in HEVC or H.264 and keep that hot: it is what clients, festivals and reels play, and the player streams it at exactly that bitrate. The ProRes master joins the selects in cold the same day; browsers cannot play it, so it was never the file being clicked.

4

A year on: review, then decide

If nobody has played a viewing export in twelve months, it can go cold too. If a re-edit is likely, leave it. The dashboard shows last-played dates so the decision is not a guess.

The mistake to avoid

Two of them. Keeping the 60 GB ProRes master hot because it feels safer, and archiving the 11 GB export to save a dollar: backwards, because the export is the only one of the two that plays, and the master is the one that comes back at line speed the day a re-edit is real. And uploading every rushes drive: the RAID you already own is the cheapest byte there is, and the cloud copy only needs what a reshoot could not replace, the master and the selects.

The same year, elsewhere

Tape, the big clouds,
and where the fees hide.

Cold storage is not a new idea. Tape has done it for decades and the big clouds sell archive tiers at a fraction of a cent per gigabyte. Both work. Both charge in places a filmmaker does not expect, and the sticker price is never the number that matters. The scenario below is the recommended cold set from the table above: 4.3 TB of masters and selects kept for a year, with one project, 360 GB, brought back once.

LTO tape

The cheapest bytes on earth once the drive is paid for, and the slowest to get back: a drive on a desk, a cartridge to find, a linear read to wait through, and a generation cycle that turns today's cartridges into tomorrow's migration project. Ideal for the copy nobody opens. Useless for the link a client wants today.

Big-cloud archive tiers

Storage at a fraction of a cent per gigabyte, then a retrieval fee per gigabyte, a minimum storage period billed whether you keep the file or not, a restore window measured in hours, and egress per gigabyte to get the file onto your machine. Every one of those is a line on the bill that a monthly rate here already includes.

Here

Half the hot rate, encrypted at rest, restored at your connection speed with no retrieval fee, no minimum stay and no egress bill, within a monthly allowance of twice your cold pool. It is not the cheapest byte: the clouds' deep tiers store the same terabyte for a dollar a month. It is the cheapest byte that is still inside your library, one switch from hot.

uncompressed.io
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval
S3 Glacier Deep Archive
Azure Archive
Google Cloud Archive
LTO-9 tape
Storagelist rate
$20 per TBa month
$0.0036 per GB:$3.60 per TB a month
$0.00099 per GB:$0.99 per TB a month
$0.00099 per GB:$0.99 per TB a month
$0.0012 per GiB:about $1.20 per TB a month
$90 to $102 per18 TB cartridge, once
4.3 TB of mastersand selectsfor 12 months
$1,200 at list;$960 on Max, $720 on Vault
$187
$51
$51
$62
$204 for two cartridges,plus a $6,399 to $8,499 drive
Minimumstay
None
90 days
180 days
180 days
365 days
None
Fees to bringback one project(360 GB)
$0
$3.60 standard or $0 bulk,plus $23 egress
$7.20 standard or $0.90 bulk,plus $23 egress
$7.20 standard or $36 priority,plus $23 egress
$18 retrieval,plus $43 egress
$0
Wait beforethe download
None: the copy starts nowand runs at your line speed
3 to 5 hours standard,5 to 12 hours bulk
Up to 12 hours standard,up to 48 hours bulk
Up to 15 hours standard for objectsunder 10 GB; priority is capped at10 GiB an hour per account
None: milliseconds,then the download
Find and mount the cartridge,then about 20 minutes of linearread at 300 MB/s
Restoreallowance
Twice your cold poola month: 10 TB here
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
No cap; every GB billed
Whatever the drivecan read
What it takesto run
A switch inyour library
A bucket, lifecycle rules,restore jobs, a bill to read
A bucket, lifecycle rules,restore jobs, a bill to read
A container, tier rules,rehydration jobs, a bill to read
A bucket, lifecycle rules,a bill to read
A drive, LTFS software, a shelf,and a migration each generation:LTO-9 reads LTO-8 and LTO-9 only
The year,with onerestore
$1,200 at list;$960 on Max
$214
$82
$81
$123
$6,603 the first year;a cartridge pair holdsfour such years

List prices in US dollars for US regions, fetched 1 September 2026 and rounded. The clouds bill in binary gigabytes, which makes their figures about 7% lower than the decimal ones shown. Egress assumes the first 100 GB a month free on AWS and Azure, then the first-tier internet rate ($0.09, $0.087 and $0.12 per GB). Here, 4.3 TB is five whole blocks at list; 1 TB is included on Max and 2 TB on Vault, which brings the year to $960 or $720. Tape prices are the lowest dealer prices seen that day, before tax; full-height LTO-9 drives are rated at 400 MB/s native, the desktop Thunderbolt units priced here at 300 MB/s.

Read the bottom row honestly. If you are willing to run a bucket, the deep tiers store the same terabyte for a dollar a month, and a year of masters and selects with one restore costs about what a single month costs here. What you are paying for here is that the archive lives inside the same library as the hot copy: no console, no lifecycle rule, no restore job, no egress line, and a master that is back in the review room the moment the copy verifies, inside an allowance you never have to think about. That is worth $20 a terabyte to a studio whose editor’s time costs more than its storage. It is not worth it for an archive nobody will touch for five years; for that, tape or a deep tier is the right answer, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The asymmetry runs the other way on the hot side. S3 Standard is $0.023 per GB a month, $23 a terabyte, but every play from it is egress at $0.09 per GB: twenty full plays of a 60 GB master is 1.2 TB out, $108, before a player, a review room or a share page exists. Hot here is $40 per TB with unlimited plays. That is why the split works: keep the hot copy where plays are free, and keep the cold copy where the byte is half price and still one switch from hot.

Questions

Frequently asked

What exactly happens when I move a master to cold?

It leaves your live library: it cannot stream, be embedded or be reviewed until you re-hydrate it. The file stays yours, encrypted at rest, on the cold rate, and the space it used on the hot side is freed immediately. Nothing is transcoded on the way in or out; the bytes that come back are the bytes you archived, verified by size on restore.

What should the hot copy of a delivered film be?

A high-bitrate export, 100 to 200 Mbps in HEVC or H.264, not the ProRes master. The player streams the exact file you upload, so a 150 Mbps export plays at 150 Mbps, about seven times the 4K ceiling of the best streaming platforms. Browsers do not decode ProRes, so a ProRes master in the hot library is only ever a download; keep it cold with the rushes and re-hydrate it when a re-edit is real.

How long does re-hydration take?

It runs at your connection speed, because the transfer is a straight copy, not a queued retrieval. On a gigabit line a 100 GB master is back in roughly a quarter of an hour. There is no waiting window and no per-request fee.

Is there a limit on how much I can re-hydrate?

Yes: twice your cold storage per calendar month, resetting on the 1st. With 1 TB of cold storage you can bring back 2 TB in a month; with 4 TB, 8 TB. It is generous by design, but it is a real cap, and the dashboard shows how much of it you have used.

Should I put all my rushes in cold?

No. Keep every card and drive on local disks and a RAID: that is the cheapest storage you own and the one your edit runs from. Cold is the off-site copy of what a reshoot could not replace, the delivered master and the selects that made the cut. On most jobs that is about a fifth of what was shot: 4.3 TB a year of cold blocks, $80 a month at year end on Max, against $120 a month for the same set kept hot.

Can I archive a 400 GB camera master?

Yes. Masters up to 20 GB move through the web dashboard; anything larger moves through the macOS app, which streams the file part by part so a laptop closing mid-transfer resumes rather than restarts.

What if I downgrade to a plan without cold storage?

Lite and Pro have no cold pool, so a switch is blocked while anything sits in cold. Restore what you want to keep hot, delete what you do not, then switch. Nothing is deleted for you.

Is cold storage a Vault feature?

It comes with Max (1 TB cold) and Vault (2 TB cold, plus 1 TB per extra seat), and either can add cold blocks at $20 per TB a month. Free, Lite and Pro are hot only.

Size it, then move it

Max includes 1.5 TB hot and 1 TB cold. Vault includes 2 TB hot and 2 TB cold, plus 1 TB of each per extra seat. Blocks beyond that are $40 per TB hot and $20 per TB cold, a month.

See the rate cards

Sources

  1. 1.uncompressed.io pricing and storage blocks
  2. 2.uncompressed.io Vault: included storage and seats
  3. 3.Vimeo Help Center: guidelines for determining playback resolution, 4K ceiling of 22 Mbps (fetched 2 September 2026)
  4. 4.Amazon S3 storage classes: Glacier tiers, minimum storage durations, overhead per object
  5. 5.Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes: Deep Archive at $0.00099 per GB-month
  6. 6.Amazon S3 pricing: Standard storage, data transfer out and the 100 GB free allowance
  7. 7.AWS Price List, Amazon S3, us-east-1 (Glacier storage and retrieval rates, published 31 August 2026)
  8. 8.Amazon S3 documentation: archive retrieval options and times
  9. 9.Amazon S3 documentation: storage classes and minimum storage durations
  10. 10.Azure Retail Prices API: Archive storage, retrieval and priority retrieval meters, East US LRS
  11. 11.Azure documentation: access tiers and the 180-day archive early-deletion period
  12. 12.Azure documentation: rehydrating from the archive tier, priorities, times and the 10 GiB-per-hour cap
  13. 13.Azure bandwidth pricing: internet egress from North America
  14. 14.Google Cloud Storage pricing: Archive storage, retrieval, operations and egress
  15. 15.Google Cloud Storage documentation: storage classes, 365-day minimum, millisecond access
  16. 16.LTO Program: LTO-9 capacity and transfer rate
  17. 17.LTO Program: generation compatibility (LTO-9 reads and writes LTO-8 and LTO-9 only)
  18. 18.BackupWorks: Quantum LTO-9 cartridge price
  19. 19.Tape4Backup: LTO-9 cartridge prices (August 2026 increase noted)
  20. 20.LTO World: OWC Archive Pro LTO-9 Thunderbolt drive price and rated speed
  21. 21.Maxx Digital: mLogic mTape LTO-9 Thunderbolt drive price and rated speed
  22. 22.Apple ProRes white paper (April 2022): target data rates by format and frame rate
  23. 23.Blackmagic Design: URSA Mini Pro 12K technical specifications, Blackmagic RAW data rates

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Hot vs Cold Storage for Footage: What It Means, What It Costs | uncompressed.io