Uploadcare storage options

Uploadcare storage requires no configuration and works out of the box. The traffic and storage costs are included in your plan, and you can monitor your usage in the Dashboard.

Storage workflow:

  1. A file gets to our storage in one of your projects identified by its Public API key.
  2. Unless the file is stored, it will be deleted after 24 hours. Read about storage behavior down below.
  3. The file becomes available on Uploadcare CDN after the first request.

When further processing files:

File storing behavior

You can specify whether you want to keep files permanently or not.

The UPLOADCARE_STORE parameter determines if an uploaded file should be stored temporarily or permanently and can have the following values:

  • 0 - do not mark the uploaded file as stored and remove it after 24 hours.
  • 1 - mark the uploaded file as stored.
  • auto - defers the choice of storage behavior to the auto-store setting.

Auto-store setting in the Dashboard is turned ON by default.

Stored or not, you can delete file at any time.

Defaults

The default storing behavior in the Upload API depends on the user registration date.

For all users registered after February 12, 2024 (UTC 13:30), if they don't specify a UPLOADCARE_STORE value during upload, the file-storage behavior will default to auto. It allows you to use the storage behavior specified in the store setting in the Dashboard.

For users registered before February 12, 2024, the default value is 0. If you haven't provided any UPLOADCARE_STORE value during upload, the uploaded file will be deleted after 24 hours. When unsure, we recommend to use auto and control the storage behavior through auto-store setting.

Our official libraries default to auto to improve quality of life for both old and new users.

S3 bucket integration

This option is about connecting an Amazon S3 bucket to one or more of your Uploadcare projects.

Read more about setting up S3 integration.

Uploadcare storage backup

You can have all your stored files to be copied to a custom S3 bucket automatically. Connect the storage once, and the system will do backups on a timely basis.

Read more about setting up a backup.