Before you retire the hardware
Retiring a computer or sorting inherited drives? Keep every readable part in a checked, repairable archive. Verify it and make a second copy before you erase or recycle the original.
Free Reader included. Licences and pricing →
Verify your archive and make a second checked copy before you erase or recycle the original drive.
Identify the drive by its model, capacity, and serial number, then choose where to save the archive.
Review the space required, then copy every readable part into an archive. Pause and resume when you need to.
Check the archive for damage and review any parts the drive could not read.
Copy the whole archive folder to a separate location. Register both copies and check them over time. Keep the original until both copies are confirmed.
Keep your drive’s contents together with the means to check and repair them. Public formats and included instructions let you recover the image even without ArchiveHive.
Follow a worked example: recover our sample archive using other tools →
The same positions appear in each folder. Green blocks survive; amber dashed blocks are damaged.
Same features. Personal for home use; Commercial for your organisation.
Open, search, check and repair archives, and recover files. Included in every download; no licence needed.
For your own drives, and the drives of people you are helping out.
$49one-time payment$59
Launch offer ends 31 October. Regular price: $59.
Not for archiving drives as part of a business or paid service.
Buy Personal — $49For archiving drives within a business, lab, or other organisation.
$149one-time payment$199
Launch offer ends 31 October. Regular price: $199.
This licence covers your organisation’s own drives. Paid work on clients’ drives requires a separate services licence.
Ask about a services licenceBuy Commercial — $149Thirty-day refund, no questions asked.
No. You can open, search, check and repair existing archives, and recover their files, for free. You only need a licence to create a new archive from a drive.
There is no time-limited trial. Instead there is a thirty-day refund with no questions asked: buy it, try it on your own drive, and if it does not work for you, write to us.
ArchiveHive can retry difficult sectors and records any regions it cannot read, but no imaging tool can make a failing drive safe to read. If the only copy of something irreplaceable is on a drive that is already failing, stop and consult a specialist recovery lab before reading it again. Preserve drives before they fail whenever you can.
A sector-level image of the drive in Zstandard-compressed chunks, SHA-256 checksums for every chunk, PAR2 recovery data that can repair damaged chunks, a TOML manifest describing the drive and the capture, and a plain-text recovery guide with copies of the format specifications. All of it can be read with ordinary tools that have nothing to do with us.
ArchiveHive sends no telemetry or archive contents to Steeltype. It contacts us to check for updates or fetch a licence when you enter an activation code. Automatic update checks are off by default; you can enable them or check manually. Archives stored on a network drive use the connection to the location you choose.
Yes. Archives can be checked, repaired and extracted on either platform. Direct file extraction uses the same bounded filesystem readers on both; APFS and unsupported structures still need a compatible host or other tools. Encrypted data needs its recovery keys. The same licence file works on both platforms.
Apple silicon Macs running macOS 13 or later. Intel Macs are not supported in this release.
Expect hours for a large drive, and longer when difficult sectors need repeated attempts. Space depends on the contents and recovery protection: photos, video, and encrypted data may compress very little. The default 100% recovery protection adds roughly the compressed image’s size again. The planning screen estimates the maximum before you begin. Whole-image export and mounting need space roughly equal to the original drive capacity. Selected-file extraction needs space for the chosen output and its receipts.
For Windows and macOS. Open an archive for free, or choose a licence to create your own.
