CloudStudio storage is organized into four tiers, each tuned for a different access pattern. Costs scale with performance — Hot is the priciest, Deep is essentially free. Picking the right tier is the single biggest lever you have on your storage bill.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.cloudstud.io/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
The tiers
| Tier | Use case | Performance | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Active project working storage | Fastest — full edit performance | Highest |
| Nearline | Recently finished projects, occasional reference | Fast — usable for an edit if needed | Mid |
| Archive | Long-term retention with reasonable recall | Slow — minutes to hours to restore | Low |
| Deep | Compliance retention, cold backup | Slow — hours to days to restore | Lowest |
Hot
What active edits run on. Your editors stream from Hot, scratch caches land on Hot, exports drop to Hot before being delivered. Plan for a Hot pool that comfortably fits every project currently in active production, with ~30% headroom.Nearline
For projects that wrapped recently and might come back for revisions or pickup. Reading from Nearline is fast enough to edit from, but performance is noticeably worse than Hot — clients won’t notice during a review, but you wouldn’t want to edit a 6K timeline on Nearline. A common pattern: when a show locks, demote the project from Hot to Nearline. If pickups come up, promote back to Hot for the duration.Archive
For finished projects you’re keeping for a year or more. Restore time is minutes-to-hours, so you can pull a finished show back for reference, awards submission, or a re-edit, but it’s not something you’d do on a tight deadline. Use Archive for the deliverables, masters, and selects from finished productions.Deep
For compliance and disaster recovery. Restores take hours-to-days. The cheapest option, often included free with your CloudStudio plan. Use Deep for full-project tarballs of wrapped shows — your “we can always get it back” backup, not your “we need it tomorrow” backup.Pools
Each tier in your workspace is made up of one or more pools. A pool is a discrete storage unit with its own mount point, quota, and access controls. Workspaces commonly have:- One Hot pool per active production (so quotas are scoped per show)
- One shared Nearline pool for the workspace
- One shared Archive pool for the workspace
- One Deep pool for the org
Quotas
Each tier has a workspace-level quota measured in bytes. Uploads check the sum ofused_bytes across all pools of that tier and reject if the upload would exceed the workspace quota.
The Deep tier has no workspace-level cap — you can always write to Deep.
You see current usage in the workspace dashboard. Watch for:
- Hot pool > 80% full → time to demote a finished project to Nearline, or request a Hot capacity increase
- Nearline > 80% full → time to push older content to Archive or Deep
- A single project > 50% of Hot pool → consider giving it a dedicated Hot pool so it doesn’t block other shows
Moving data between tiers
Workspace admins can promote and demote at the folder level — usually a project folder. The action is:- Open the workspace dashboard
- Click the source pool
- Select the folder you want to move
- Click Move to → [destination tier]
- Choose the target pool (if more than one exists in that tier)
What you can’t do yourself
A few storage operations go through CloudStudio support:- Adding a new pool (changes provisioning at the infrastructure layer)
- Increasing a workspace tier quota
- Recovering deleted content older than 30 days
- Changing the path prefix or share name of an existing pool
Cost levers
Three biggest savings opportunities:- Demote on milestone, not on done. Move finished acts to Nearline when they lock, not when the whole show wraps. You’ll free Hot months earlier.
- Archive masters and deliverables, not working files. A finished show’s working folders (proxies, scratch, intermediate exports) can be deleted once delivered. Keep only the source media, project files, and final masters in Archive.
- Tarball to Deep. For really long-term retention (multi-year), put a single tarball per project in Deep. Cheaper than keeping the unpacked folder structure in Archive, and you can always restore selectively from the tar.
What’s next
- Billing & invoices — how tier usage translates to monthly cost
- Workspace setup — overall admin loop