Vault Data Facilities & Storage Locations

About Vault Data Centers

A key aspect of the Vault service is that it utilizes non-profit, mission-aligned technical infrastructure. This allows us to guarantee the low-cost of the Vault service, that the technical infrastructure is administered by a public-interest non-profit, and that all physical hardware is designed, constructed, and maintained with the goal of preservation and access to archived data in perpetuity. The main Vault data centers are owned and operated by Internet Archive, including everything from the building housing the data center to all hardware and systems. Core infrastructure operational staff are Internet Archive employees. Internet Archive data centers are also designed to be environmentally friendly as far as power consumption and climate impact and the technical infrastructure is built using commonly-available commodity hardware in order to limit risk exposure to specialized or uncommon hardware and technologies.

Vault Storage Locations & Codes

Code	Name	Physical Location
UW1	US West 1	Greater San Francisco Bay Area
UW2	US West 2	Greater San Francisco Bay Area
UW3	US West 3	Greater San Francisco Bay Area
CW1	CA West 1	British Columbia, Canada
CW2	CA West 2	British Columbia, Canada
CW3	CA West 3	British Columbia, Canada
EE1	EU East 1	Greater Amsterdam Area, the Netherlands

The Vault standard service package guarantees that 3 to 4 copies are located in at least 2 physical locations, with those locations being determined by the Vault team. For a small additional fee, Vault users may also choose to have additional copies stored in user-specified locations, such as in Canada and Europe. Vault users may also request that, for an additional fee, copies of their data be stored in third-party data facilities, such as AWS, GCP, Azure, et cetera. In some instances, Internet Archive owns and operates infrastructure that is physically located in the data facilities of partner non-profit organizations, such as university or university library data centers, similar to how Internet Archive digitization centers are sometimes housed in university, government, or public libraries. This infrastructure is not a default Vault storage location, but we are happy to work with any organizations that want to integrate their local data facilities as a possible storage location. Contact us at [e-mail] if you are interested in third-party storage options and costs.

See the Vault Policies & Procedures section for more information on data center security and related policies. 

Last updated on January 12, 2024.