cold storage

Cold storage is long-term storage or long-term archiving. It is about storing data over extremely long periods of time that may be needed in years, decades or even no longer at all.

Cold storage assumes that the data format in which the data is stored will still be used in years and decades, that the storage media will not lose the data over time and that there are still drives on which the storage media can be read. The retrieval time for cold data is naturally much higher than for current data stored in clouds, on tape drives or hard disks( HD) and solid state drives ( SSD).