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 →
Your estimated annual cost
$0

Time lostPeople searching and manually handling files
$0
Storage spent on ROTData you could delete or archive
$0
Cold data on fast storageExtra paid versus an archive tier
$0
Storage you could recover every year: $0
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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.

Engineers, editors, and researchers looking for files they know exist, across systems they can’t see into.

Recreating.

When a file can’t be found, someone makes it again. Now you pay for the work twice, and store it twice.

Manual cleanup.

IT writes scripts, runs reports, and chases owners to ask “can we delete this?”, one folder at a time.

No visibility.

Copying data for a new project, a migration, or an AI model, with no record of what went where.

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.

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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

Compliance

GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA all expect you to know what you keep and where.

Energy

Every terabyte you keep is a terabyte you power, cool, and back up, all year long.

Planning

Buying capacity without usage data often means buying it twice: once now, and again next year.

HOW DISKOVER CHANGES IT

All three costs come down the same way.

People lose time because files are hard to find. Storage fills because the data nobody needs looks like the data everybody needs. One catalog of every file fixes both.

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.

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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.

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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.

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FAQ

Questions about the cost of data.

It depends on the tier. One petabyte costs roughly $12,000 to $43,000 a year in cloud archive, and $500,000 to $1 million on high-performance storage on-premises. Spread evenly across four common tiers, the average is about $367,000 a year, before support, power, and staff.
ROT stands for redundant, obsolete, and trivial: duplicates, temporary files, and data past its retention period. It often makes up a third of a storage estate or more. Learn more about ROT data.
In Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025 survey of 12,000 knowledge workers, teams spend 25% of their time just searching for answers. In a 40-hour week, that is 10 hours.
Your team sets a cost per gigabyte, globally or for specific volumes and folders. It can include hardware, cloud fees, power, support, and staff time. Diskover applies it to every file, so every report shows cost next to size.
Only when a policy you set up says so. Policies run after each scan or on a schedule, with a dry run first and a log of every action.

SOURCES

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.

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