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Archive Lifecycle

Evidence packs are written to S3 standard, served immediately to anyone with a download link for the first 90 days, then transitioned to S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term retention. The 90 + Deep-Archive pattern is what lets Roboticks meet the EU Product Liability Directive’s 10-year minimum retention at a cost that does not dominate the bill.

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The lifecycle

The transition is automated via an S3 lifecycle rule on the evidence-pack bucket. No manual action is required.

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Retention floor

The default retention is 10 years, set to satisfy the EU Product Liability Directive’s 10-year tail. The floor is configurable per project: The floor is set in Project Settings → Evidence Retention and is one-way ratcheting — you can extend a project’s floor, never shorten it. This protects against operator error that could delete legally-required evidence.
Retention is your legal responsibility. Roboticks holds the bits; the obligation to retain them is yours. Confirm the regulatory retention period applicable to your machinery class with your legal team before shipping. Roboticks’ defaults reflect common best practice, not legal advice.

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Retrieval from Glacier Deep Archive

Retrieving a pack from Deep Archive is a two-step asynchronous process:
1

Issue a restore request

Either from the dashboard (Releases → archived release → Restore from Archive) or via CLI:
2

Wait for the restore

Deep Archive supports Standard and Bulk only. Expedited is for the warmer Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval classes, which Roboticks does not use.
3

Download the restored copy

Once restored, the pack is available in S3 standard for 7 days. Generate a download link from the dashboard or:
After 7 days the restored copy is purged; the original Deep Archive copy is unaffected. Re-restore as needed.

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MCAP archival

MCAP bag files follow the same lifecycle as the packs that reference them. When a pack transitions to Deep Archive, every MCAP referenced exclusively by archived packs transitions with it. MCAPs referenced by any pack still in the 90-day hot window remain in hot storage. This is why the manifest’s mcaps[*].storage_class field exists: a recently restored pack may have some MCAPs in STANDARD (re-restored) and others in DEEP_ARCHIVE (not yet restored, requiring a separate request). To restore the pack and all its MCAPs in one call:

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Cost worked example

Worked for a typical Team-tier customer producing one pack per release, every 3 weeks, with ~5 GB of MCAPs per pack:
  • Year 1 (17 packs, all hot first 90 days, then Deep Archive):
    • Average hot storage: ~22 GB-months × 0.05=0.05 = 1.10
    • Average cold storage: ~700 GB-months × 0.005=0.005 = 3.50
    • Total: ~$4.60
  • Years 2–10 (steady state, all packs in Deep Archive):
    • ~85 GB cold storage × 12 months × 0.005=0.005 = 5.10 / year
  • 10-year total: ~$50.
The cost is dominated by MCAP volume. Customers that capture multi-gigabyte MCAPs per test can prune to representative samples for archival (a pack can reference MCAPs by SHA-256 even after the bytes themselves are deleted, though the auditor then sees a STORAGE_PRUNED flag on the manifest entry).

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Configuring lifecycle

Project owners control:
  • Hot retention window — default 90 days. Reducible to 30 days for cost-sensitive projects; expandable to 365 for active projects that re-pull evidence frequently.
  • Total retention — default 10 years. Ratcheting up only.
  • MCAP-only retention — independently set MCAP retention shorter than pack retention (the manifest preserves SHA-256s; only the bytes go). For projects where MCAPs are very large but the rest of the pack (logs, JUnit, coverage) is the meaningful evidence.
All settings live under Project Settings → Evidence Retention.

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Disaster recovery

The evidence-pack bucket is replicated cross-region (eu-west-1 primary, us-east-2 mirror). A single region outage does not affect retrieval. The Deep Archive class itself carries 99.999999999% (eleven nines) annual durability per AWS’s published SLA.

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Next steps

Release scoping

How a Release pins what an archived pack will contain.

Customer handoff

What to tell an auditor about restoring a 7-year-old pack.