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:

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

When further processing files:

On-the-fly operations (like image processing) don't consume your storage space because results are only cached on CDN.
REST API operations, such as video encoding, document conversion, save new files to the storage.

File storing behavior

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

When uploading a file, Upload API UPLOADCARE_STORE parameter can be set to 0, 1, or auto:

0 — the file will be deleted after 24 hours. If no value is provided, 0 is used as the default.
1 — the file will be stored permanently until explicitly deleted.
auto — defers the choice of storage behavior to the project's auto-store setting (which is ON by default).

If you haven't provided any value during upload, you can still store file withing 24 hours via REST API. Stored or not, you can delete file any time.

Use this parameter to fine-tune the storage behavior. When unsure, it's recommended to use auto and control the storage behavior through project settings. Our official libraries default to auto.

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 here.

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.