Getting Started with Impossible Cloud Storage

Welcome to the Impossible Cloud Storage family! This guide is designed to help you get up and running as smoothly as possible, whether you're a business or an individual user.

What are 'Buckets' and 'Objects'?

At the heart of our service are two simple concepts - Buckets and Objects.

A Bucket is a container for your data. Think of it like a big digital box where you store all your files, which we refer to as Objects.

An Object represents an individual file that you store in a Bucket. This can be any file you need to store – a photo, a document, a video, and more.

Once an object is placed in a bucket, it's ready for you to interact with. You can open it, download it to your device, or update its properties. And when you're finished with an object or even an entire bucket, you can delete them to keep your resources tidy and organized.

Key Protective Features: Object Lock and Versioning

We've built in a couple of unique features to ensure the security and integrity of your data.

Object Lock is a feature that protects your objects from being altered or deleted for a set period. It's like a digital safe for your most important files. It's also known as WORM: Write-Once-Read-Many.

It is designed to provide an additional layer of data protection. It prevents the permanent deletion of objects during a period defined by you, serving as an enforceable retention policy. This comes in handy for regulatory compliance or when you need an extra safety net for your data.

Versioning is another safety measure that lets you retrieve any deleted or overwritten items. It's like having a time machine for your data!

The true strength of versioning-enabled buckets lies in their ability to help you recover objects from accidental deletion or overwriting. Let's say you delete an object; Impossible Cloud Storage will insert a 'delete marker' instead of permanently removing the object. This 'delete marker' then becomes the current version of the object. Similarly, if you overwrite an object, it results in a new object version in the bucket, but don't worry, you can always restore the previous version.

For a deeper dive into Versioning and Object Lock, we invite you to explore our detailed guides:

• Learn more about managing different versions of your objects with Versioning.

• Discover how to add an extra layer of data protection with Object Lock.