Bioarchive is meant to be a place for a ten year archival of data at a low up front cost. With most grants, PIs are responsible to preserving data well beyond the end of the funding period. With Bioarchive, storage space can be purchased before the end of the grant, then data can be safely kept there until 10 years from purchase. PIs might need to contact Grants and Contracts to get an exception for this, but in our experience, these are nearly universally granted. Some ongoing projects also create large amounts of data that do not need to be actively accessed over the lifetime of the project. By storing data on Bioarchive, you can safely keep this data while not having to pay for the higher cost of storage on Biocluster or other storage services.

Due to the long term storage goals of Bioarchive, billing on Bioarchive is different than most services. Each private storage area is called a Bucket, and each Bucket needs to have a CFOP number associated with it. Before we charge on any bucket, we give users 80GB of space to make sure the service meets their needs and they want to proceed. Once a bucket passes this initial 80GB threshold and each subsequent 1 TB threshold, we bill for $200 for each new TB in the next monthly billing period. Ten years after a Bucket is billed, the PI will be offered the choice of removing a TB of data or paying for an additional 10 years.