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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Open-source clients, v0.1.0

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.