Storage Deletion Policy

Carolina Cloud’s warm S3 storage runs on Wasabi, which enforces a minimum storage duration of 30 days on every object. Files deleted before they reach that age continue to incur storage charges through the end of their first 30 days, regardless of who deletes them. See How does Wasabi’s minimum storage duration policy work? for the upstream policy.

Rather than pass that cost through verbatim — which would make every accidental rm -rf a billing surprise — Carolina Cloud absorbs the typical churn and only charges when in-retention deletions clearly exceed the level we can reasonably swallow.

How it works

We track, per bucket, how many bytes you’ve deleted that are still inside their 30-day retention window. We then compare that figure to a free allowance.

• Free allowance: 30% of your current stored bytes.
• Overage: any in-retention deleted bytes above that allowance.
• Overage rate: $9/TB/month — the same rate as live storage, prorated hourly.

If your bucket holds 1 TB, you can have up to 300 GB of in-retention deletions sitting there at no extra charge. Delete another 200 GB on top of that and the additional 200 GB bills as overage until each file ages past its 30-day mark and falls out of the retention window.

Small buckets are exempt

Buckets under 100 GB are not metered for deletion overage at all. Below that threshold the math doesn’t matter — Wasabi’s minimum-duration cost on a small bucket is rounding error, and we’d rather not put a gauge in front of users who will never plausibly hit it.

Reading the dashboard

When your bucket crosses the 100 GB tracking threshold, the Warm S3 Storage card on Usage & Billing grows a small gauge underneath the headline price. The gauge shows:

• How many GB of in-retention deletions you currently have.
• Your free allowance in GB (30% of stored bytes).
• A bar that fills as you approach the allowance and continues filling past it.

If you go over, the warm-storage line item rolls the overage charge into the same $/hr figure shown at the top of the card, and the inline note breaks out the overage portion so you can see exactly what’s being added.

Practical guidance

• Normal use is free. Iterating on data, replacing files, or cleaning up small mistakes will not push a healthy bucket past 30%.
• Bulk reorganizations may briefly cost. If you rewrite or move large portions of a freshly-uploaded dataset, expect overage charges that decay back to zero over the next 30 days as the deleted objects age out.
• The cost is bounded. Each in-retention byte stops costing the moment it ages past 30 days from its original upload. There is no compounding and no penalty beyond the per-hour rate.
• Cold storage is not affected. This policy applies only to the warm Wasabi tier. Cold storage has its own pricing model (see Pricing & Billing).

Why this exists

Wasabi’s pricing assumes objects live for at least 30 days, which is what makes their flat per-TB rate work. A small number of accounts could otherwise repeatedly upload and delete large datasets within hours, generating real costs that the headline storage price does not cover. The 30% collar is sized so that ordinary editing workflows pay nothing extra and only sustained high-churn patterns surface the underlying cost.