Private Archive

Encrypted offsite backup  ·  For the work that has to keep

A quiet place
for work that should
survive any single
provider you trust today.

Private Archive is a sealed vault for photographers, filmmakers, illustrators and designers. Restic encrypts your files on the desk, the bytes are ferried through Tor, and what arrives offsite is opaque — unreadable to us, unreadable to anyone who isn't holding your key.

Download client How it works

On the question of where the work goes

A creative archive is not a folder of documents. It is a record of attention — the unrepeatable hours of a shoot, the slow accretion of layers on a canvas, the cuts that did not make the final reel. It deserves a different kind of storage than the bright, indexed, behaviourally-mined places where everyday files live.

So we built Private Archive around a different assumption: that the company you trust today may not exist in fifteen years, and that the durability of your archive should not depend on any one of us being around to provide it. Restic encrypts on your machine, with open-source code you can read line by line. The encrypted blobs are then stored offsite, durably — where, exactly, isn't yours to worry about. What matters is that the keys are yours, the encryption is auditable, and your archive is no longer hostage to any single provider outliving its welcome.

What remains is a quiet, durable, indifferent vault. The way an archive should feel.

How it works

Three movements, one motion

  1. I.

    Encrypted on the desk

    Restic encrypts each file locally before it touches the network. Keys never leave the machine. We could not read a frame of your work for anyone — including ourselves.

  2. II.

    Carried through Tor

    Transport is wrapped in Tor end-to-end. There is no IP, no device fingerprint, no account email — the client is identified only by the SHA-256 of its certificate.

  3. III.

    Held, opaquely

    The bytes that land offsite are already encrypted; we cannot read them, and neither could anyone with access to the storage. Your key, on your desk, is the only thing that turns the archive back into a file.

Built for

Libraries that grow heavier with the years

  • RAW backups

    Full sensor files from every shoot — kept, not curated, not down-sampled.

  • Finished masters

    ProRes, DNxHR, and graded exports preserved at delivery quality.

  • Source files

    Layered PSDs, AEPs, Procreate stacks — the way the work was actually made.

  • Project archives

    Old jobs going back years, kept whole, recoverable when a client returns.

  • Personal vaults

    The negatives of a life: family video, scanned film, manuscripts.

  • Studio overflow

    What no longer fits on the working drives but must not be discarded.

Pricing

Pay-as-you-go, in Monero

Top up a balance; it consumes itself by the second; refill when you need to. No subscription. No minimum. No card, no invoice trail — subaddresses generated per client.

Download

Open-source clients

Verify against SHA256SUMS before you run. Builds are reproducible from source. First launch issues your X.509 certificate — keep it; it is the only thing that authenticates you to your archive, and there is no recovery path if it is lost.

macOS arm64 · Apple Silicon privatearchive-darwin-arm64.tar.gz macOS amd64 · Intel privatearchive-darwin-amd64.tar.gz Linux amd64 privatearchive-linux-amd64.tar.gz Linux arm64 privatearchive-linux-arm64.tar.gz Windows amd64 privatearchive-windows-amd64.zip Windows arm64 privatearchive-windows-arm64.zip FreeBSD amd64 privatearchive-freebsd-amd64.tar.gz FreeBSD arm64 privatearchive-freebsd-arm64.tar.gz OpenBSD amd64 privatearchive-openbsd-amd64.tar.gz OpenBSD arm64 privatearchive-openbsd-arm64.tar.gz Source archive for those auditing the encryption themselves privatearchive-source.tar.gz Checksums all platforms SHA256SUMS

Install & keep up to date

Every channel below installs the same reproducible, signed binaries. Verify direct downloads against SHA256SUMS; the apt, dnf and pacman repositories are GPG repo-signed with fingerprint 4792 23EA 8405 287A 11FB B12E 02A7 7A1E EDD0 F111.

Any platform — one line

curl -fsSL https://privatearchive.xyz/install.sh | bash

Or download a tarball for macOS, Linux, Windows, FreeBSD or OpenBSD (amd64 + arm64) — and the source — from the latest release.

Debian / Ubuntu — apt

curl -fsSL https://privatearchive.xyz/apt/release-key.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/privatearchive.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/privatearchive.gpg] https://privatearchive.xyz/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/privatearchive.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install privatebackup

Fedora / RHEL — dnf

sudo curl -fsSL https://privatearchive.xyz/dnf/privatearchive.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/privatearchive.repo
sudo dnf install privatebackup

Arch — pacman

curl -fsSL https://privatearchive.xyz/pacman/release-key.asc | sudo pacman-key --add -
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 479223EA8405287A11FBB12E02A77A1EEDD0F111
printf '\n[privatearchive]\nServer = https://privatearchive.xyz/pacman\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf
sudo pacman -Sy privatebackup

macOS — Homebrew

brew install https://privatearchive.xyz/brew/privatebackup.rb

Windows — Scoop

scoop install https://privatearchive.xyz/scoop/privatebackup.json