How does Wasabi's minimum storage duration policy work?

Wasabi has a minimum storage duration policy that means if stored objects are deleted before they have been stored with Wasabi for a certain number of days, a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days will apply. This policy is comparable to the minimum storage duration policies that exist with some AWS and other hyperscaler storage services.

With Wasabi minimum storage retention policy, minimum number of days are as follows:

• 90 days (default) for customers using Wasabi object storage pay-as-you-go (pay-go) pricing model.

Note - Cloud NAS and Surveillance Cloud products have a 30 day min storage retention policy for Pay-Go.

• 30 days for customers using Wasabi’s RCS pricing model

To better understand how the minimum storage retention policy works, let’s consider an example (a 90 day policy is used in this example).

• An object is stored in Wasabi on day 1

• On day 16, this object is deleted from Wasabi

In this example, you will be billed for:

• 15 days of Timed Active Storage

• 75 days of Timed Deleted Storage

On a related note, we sometimes get asked about the impact of Wasabi’s minimum storage retention policy on our cost comparisons with AWS S3. Although some AWS storage classes (i.e. AWS Glacier) have similar minimum storage retention policies, AWS S3 ‘Standard’ does not. The best way to answer this question is to compare the costs when 100 TB is stored in Wasabi and AWS S3.

If you delete the 100 TB of storage in less than 23 days, Wasabi will be more expensive than AWS S3. However, if you store the 100 TB of data for more than 23 days, Wasabi will be less expensive than AWS S3. After the first year, AWS S3 is ~4x more expensive than Wasabi (and that is before you include the extra charges that AWS applies for egress and API requests).

In summary, if you have data that you only need to keep for short periods of time before deletion, then it may be more cost effective for you to keep this data in AWS. However, as shown in this example, if you keep the data for more than 23 days, Wasabi is the more cost effective solution.