Storage Types

US3 offers three storage types: Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive, which are respectively designed for frequently accessed hot data, infrequently accessed backup data, and long-term archived data. These types fully cover various data storage scenarios from hot to cold.

Standard Storage

Standard Storage provides highly reliable, highly available, and high-performance object storage services with high throughput and low-latency response capabilities, supporting frequent access to hot data.

Key Features:

Data Durability: 99.999999999% Availability: 99.95% Access: Real-time access Application Scenarios: Social and sharing applications (images, audio, and video), large websites, big data analysis, mobile applications, and game programs.

Infrequent Access Storage

Infrequent Access Storage offers high reliability, lower storage costs, and lower access latency, making it suitable for long-term storage of infrequently accessed data. Its unit price is lower than that of Standard Storage. Infrequent Access Storage has a minimum storage duration and a minimum object size: deleting files stored for less than 30 days will incur additional fees; files smaller than 64KB will be calculated as 64KB for storage space, and data retrieval will incur fees.

Key Features:

Data Durability: 99.999999999% Availability: 99.9% Access: Real-time access Application Scenarios: Long-term backups of data from mobile applications, smart devices, government and enterprise services, and enterprise data, supporting real-time data access.

Archive Storage

Archive Storage provides high reliability, extremely low storage costs, and long-term offline cold data storage, suitable for archived data that needs long-term preservation (recommended for more than six months) and is rarely accessed during the storage period. It has the lowest unit price among the three storage types. Archive Storage has a minimum storage duration and a minimum object size: deleting files stored for less than 60 days will incur additional fees; files smaller than 64KB will be calculated as 64KB for storage space, and data retrieval will incur fees. Currently, Archive Storage is only available in mainland China regions (North China 1, North China 2, Shanghai, Guangzhou).

Key Features:

Data Durability: 99.999999999% Availability: 99.9% Access: Files need to be thawed before access. The time required to restore from the frozen state to a readable state varies depending on the file size and thaw type. Please refer to the Supplementary Notes on Product Pricing. Application Scenarios: Long-term preservation of compliance files such as archives, medical images, scientific data, and film/television materials.

Storage Type Conversion

The following automatic storage type conversions are supported:

1. Standard Storage to Infrequent Access Storage

2. Standard Storage to Archive Storage

3. Infrequent Access Storage to Archive Storage

Note:

1. To convert Archive Storage files back to Standard or Infrequent Access Storage, or convert Infrequent Access Storage files to Standard Storage, you can re-upload the files and specify the target storage type.
   For example, to convert an Infrequent Access Storage file to Standard Storage, re-upload the file and specify the Standard Storage type—the newly uploaded file will be of Standard Storage type.

2. For files already stored as Archive Storage, you must first perform a RESTORE operation to thaw them to a readable state before they can be read.

APIs supported by Storage Types