Built to last.
Hosted in France.
A consumer cloud is built to sync. PDF Archive is built to keep: your documents dated, safe, under your control, on French servers.
- archive.since2010
- archive.locationFrance 100%
- archive.fundingsubscriptions only
- archive.exitopen formats
Keeping and syncing are two trades
Both services put files somewhere. What separates them shows on the day the document still has to be worth something. This is a private archive: the document stays as it arrived, dated, in its place, for as long as you keep it.
The file does not change
A filed document is never rewritten: what you download is, byte for byte, what you sent. A sync cloud does the opposite, and that is its whole purpose: it replaces yesterday version with today one.
The upload date holds
Every document keeps the date on which you uploaded it. On a shared drive, the date of a file is the date of its last copy: on the day you have to show when something was drawn up, it is worth nothing.
The link stays valid
On a paid tier, a link or a QR code put on a document does not expire by itself: you alone decide to revoke it. Transfer services erase after a few days, and the recipient lands on a dead page.
PDF Archive against a generic cloud
Line by line, the 5 points where the two part ways. Each one is built for its own job, and that is what the table shows.
| What is being compared | PDF Archive | Generic file cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Where the data sits | Hosted in France, data inside the European Union. | Often outside the EU, with transfers that are hard to trace. |
| What the service is for | Keeping a document and dating it. | Syncing a folder between several devices. |
| How it makes money | Subscriptions, and nothing else. | Often advertising, reselling data, or the next tier up. |
| A shared link | A frozen copy, which no longer moves and stays revocable. | A mirror of the live file, which follows your edits. |
| Getting out | A full export, open formats, no negotiation. | House formats and proprietary folder trees. |
- Hosted in France
- GDPR compliant
- No advertising
- Independent since 2010
Who publishes PDF Archive
PDF Archive is published by a sole trader established in France: e.i. Valentin Beck, in Strasbourg. The service has existed since 2010.
There is no investor to pay back. That is a constraint on means, and it is above all what explains the rest: with no capital to grow, the service has no reason to show advertising, to resell data, or to hold on to you by making the way out difficult. It is paid for by its subscribers, and it has no other model in reserve.
The other side has to be said too. A small operation does not promise what a large host promises: PDF Archive is not a digital safe in the legal sense, it is certified under no archiving standard and qualified by no national agency, and it does not replace an approved trusted third party. What it does, it writes down, and you can read it before committing yourself: security, hosting, and what this service is not →
What it changes, trade by trade
The same features, but the documents, the obligations and the people on the other side are not the same.
Regulated professions
Documents filed by financial year, passed to your clients through links that last.
Read more →Freelancers & small firms
Quotes, invoices, client contracts: archived, dated, shareable through a link.
Read more →Charities and associations
Articles, minutes, accounts: filed by financial year and shared through public links.
Read more →Local government
Resolutions and newsletters, published through a link that stays valid.
Read more →Architects
A project, its stages, and the file handed to the client, frozen.
Read more →All the use cases
The other trades and the uses by question: filing, archiving, sharing.
See the hub →