Private Archive is a place to put encrypted bytes. Not a brand, not a community, not a relationship; a place. You arrive with a client certificate that you generated on your own machine, you upload Restic-encrypted blobs over Tor, and we hold those ciphertexts until your balance, paid in Monero, runs out. Then we delete them. We will not write to you about it. We do not know how.
The service is unflinching about what it refuses to learn. It does not know your name, your inbox, your address, your phone, your country, your IP, your screen resolution, your operating system, the names of your files, the contents of your files, or whether you call this a backup, an archive, or a hedge against a loss you are not ready to articulate.
It will, in exchange, not lose your data. It will not seal your data into a format only it can read. It will not raise its prices when it has you. It will not ring you up to tell you about a new feature.
The vow
Cryptographic primitives do most of the heavy lifting. Restic, an open-source backup tool first published in 2014, encrypts your archives client-side with keys generated on your hardware. The plaintext never leaves the room you sat in to make it; what arrives at our door is ciphertext, and ciphertext is all we are ever permitted to handle. The question of where, precisely, those opaque bytes are warehoused is, by deliberate design, beneath the customer’s notice — we receive no plaintext, and so the venue of its storage is a matter of housekeeping, not of trust.
Network anonymity is provided by Tor: every byte that leaves your machine, and every byte that returns, traverses three onion-routed hops. Our endpoint is a hidden service. We have no IP address to disclose, to anyone, in any future scenario, because we never had one attached to your traffic in the first place; the Tor network does not record it; the request did not arrive with one.
The arithmetic
Payment is in Monero, and it is pay-as-you-go. Each customer is given a fresh subaddress on first install. Funds you send become a balance that burns down by the second; when you wish to keep going, you top it up. There is no plan, no tier, no subscription, no renewal you can forget to cancel — only a meter that empties at the rate at which you actually use the service.
The implications of this should be spelled out plainly: if you lose your client certificate, your archive is lost. If you lose your encryption passphrase, the contents are lost forever. We treat both of these as features. A service that could recover your data on your behalf would also have to defend that capability against everyone else — a future owner, a future breach, a future disgruntled employee — and the cleanest way to defend it is to never possess it.
What it costs
You pay as you go, in Monero, against a balance that diminishes by the second for as long as your archive sits with us. When the balance approaches empty, you send a little more. There is no minimum, no commit, no monthly fee, and no such thing as a subscription — only a meter, running quietly, charging you for what you actually use and nothing else. Stop sending Monero, and in due course the service forgets you.
What you should do next
Download the client below; pick the binary that matches your machine. Run it. Generate a certificate, put a small amount of XMR into the printed subaddress, and back up something you can afford to lose, twice. Then back up something you cannot afford to lose, and verify the restore.
Then, ideally, forget about us until something breaks. That is the relationship we are offering.