COST CALCULATOR
What unmanaged data costs you every year.
The cost of unmanaged data adds up quietly: hours your teams lose to finding, copying, and cleaning up files, storage paid for data nobody needs, and cold data parked on your most expensive tier. Move the sliders to match your environment.
Everyone who creates, finds, or manages files, from production teams to IT.
Across every system: file shares, object storage, cloud, and archive.
Duplicates, temporary files, and data past its retention. About a third is typical.
Share of the remaining data nobody has opened in a year, still on premium storage.
Adjust to your own figures →
THE HUMAN COST
Your best people, doing file chores.
The calculator puts a number on the lost hours. Here is where they go, and who loses them.
Searching.
Recreating.
Manual cleanup.
No visibility.
Diskover gives every team one place to find files and gives IT the facts to act on, so people get back to the work they were hired for.
REAL RESULTS
What Diskover customers found.
Once every file is in one catalog, the waste has names, owners, and sizes. These results come from Diskover deployments.
$10M
MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT
8 PB reclaimed by a global media and entertainment company, so a planned hardware purchase could wait
2 PB
SEMICONDUCTOR
of abandoned and temporary data found, including debug and core dump output that workflows never cleared
$250K
LIFE SCIENCE
in storage overspend avoided by reclaiming more than 500 TB from core storage, within hours of the first index
DO THE MATH
Where the storage numbers come from.
Annual cost of one petabyte on four common tiers. The calculator uses the average of all four for ROT, and the gap between enterprise NAS and cloud archive for cold data.
These figures leave out support contracts, power and cooling, floor space, retrieval and egress fees, and the staff who manage it all, so they read low. Flash is also getting more expensive: enterprise SSD contract prices rose 80% in the first quarter of 2026 (Source: TrendForce).
STORAGE TIER
ANNUAL RANGE, PER PB
MIDPOINT
Cloud, standard
$180K to $300K
$240,000
Cloud, cold and archive
$12K to $43K
$27,500
On-premises, high performance
$500K to $1M
$750,000
Enterprise NAS and SAN
$300K to $600K
$450,000
Blended cost of one petabyte
Average of the four
$367,000
BEYOND THE INVOICE
The costs no calculator shows.
Unmanaged data also carries risk. Files nobody has looked at in years are exactly where sensitive data hides.
$4.99M
BREACHES
global average cost of
a data breach
Source: IBM, 2026
99%
AI EXPOSURE
of organizations have sensitive
data exposed to AI tools
Source: Varonis, 2025
34%
VISIBILITY
of organizations know where
all their data is
Source: Thales, 2026
HOW DISKOVER CHANGES IT
How to reduce data storage costs.
To reduce data storage costs, start with one view of every file, put a price on what is wasted, then clean up and tier by policy. People lose time because files are hard to find, and storage fills because the data nobody needs looks like the data everybody needs. One catalog of every file fixes both. For a longer guide, explore the 5 steps to reduce storage costs.
STEP 1 – SEE
One view of every file.
Diskover indexes every storage system in place, so anyone with access finds a file in seconds, wherever it lives.
STEP 2 – MEASURE
Put a price on the waste.
Set your own cost per gigabyte, and reports show what duplicates, old files, and cold data cost you.
STEP 3 – ACT
Clean up and tier by policy.
Policies move cold data to lower-cost storage and retire what has expired, after each scan, with a dry run first.
FAQ
Questions about the cost of data.
SOURCES
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 2026: average hourly earnings of $45.71 in professional and business services.
- Atlassian, State of Teams 2025 (12,000 knowledge workers): teams spend 25% of their time searching for answers.
- Cloud storage: AWS S3 list prices, US East, 2026. Standard is about $259,000 per PB per year, Glacier Deep Archive about $12,000, and Glacier Flexible Retrieval about $43,000. On-premises ranges: source needed.
- TrendForce, June 11, 2026: enterprise SSD contract prices up about 80% in the first quarter of 2026.
- Veritas, Global Databerg Report, March 2016 (2,550 IT decision makers in 22 countries): 33% of stored data is redundant, obsolete, or trivial.
- IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 ($4.99M); Varonis 2025 State of Data Security Report (99%); Thales 2026 Data Threat Report, February 2026 (34%).
- Diskover deployments: 8 PB reclaimed; nearly 2 PB of abandoned data found; more than 500 TB reclaimed and $250K avoided.
Method. Time lost = people × hourly rate × hours per week × working weeks. ROT cost = petabytes × blended cost × ROT share. Cold-data premium = the data left after ROT × cold share × (premium cost minus archive cost). Each cost is counted once, and none include power, floor space, egress, or staff time, so the total is conservative.
See it on your own data.
We’ll index a sample of your environment and show you
what’s recoverable against your current storage spend.