ArchiveHive stores your archives in the locations you choose. It does not send the contents of your drives to Steeltype.

What the software never sends

Archive contents, disk images, file names, folder structures, volume labels, drive serial numbers, drive health readings, machine names and user names are never sent to Steeltype by the application. If you choose a network drive for your archives, reading and writing them uses that network connection. There is no telemetry, no usage reporting, no crash reporting, and no analytics of any kind in the application.

Licence files are checked on your computer. ArchiveHive does not require an account or periodic licence checks with us, and does not stop working if it cannot reach us. Reading, verifying, repairing, mounting and extracting archives never require a licence or a connection to Steeltype.

When ArchiveHive contacts Steeltype

ArchiveHive contacts us for two purposes: checking for updates and retrieving a licence with an activation code. Automatic update checks are off by default; you can enable them or check manually.

Checking for updates: You can check manually or enable automatic checks, at most once a day. A check requests a small file from this website listing the current version. It sends no licence or device identifier; like any web request, it carries your IP address. The check never installs an update or downloads a new version for you.
Activating with a code: If you choose to install a licence by typing an activation code, the code alone is sent to us so the matching licence can be returned. No machine identifier, no drive information, and no email address is sent with it. The other two ways of installing a licence — the licence file, or pasting its text — use no network at all.

Scheduled archive checks are also optional. If you enable them, they check the archive locations you have added and keep a history on your computer. You can separately enable repair during these checks. These tasks do not send your archives or check results to Steeltype.

Both connections require HTTPS and refuse to proceed without it. The application identifies itself as ArchiveHive and nothing more — no version, no serial, no installation identifier.

This website

No analytics, no tracking scripts, no advertising, no third-party embeds, and no cookies. Nothing here tries to work out who you are, and you are not asked to identify yourself to read any of it.

Access logging is switched off on the content delivery network that serves this site, so ordinary page visits are not recorded or retained by us. Our hosting provider necessarily handles the network request itself in order to deliver the page.

Our hosting reports aggregate counts: how many requests the delivery network served, how many downloads were fetched, per file, and how many visits arrived from AlternativeTo, Hacker News, Softpedia, or MacUpdate. That last count relies on your browser saying which site linked here; the page checks it and, for those sites only, fetches a small file whose request is counted. Nothing is counted if your browser withholds that information or sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track. Those are totals for a period, not a list of events. They carry no address, nothing about your device, no way to tell one visitor from another, and no way to establish that any particular visit happened. We use these counts to understand site and download activity. If our collection practices change, we will update this page.

If you buy a licence

Payments are handled by Stripe, which acts as merchant of record. Your card details go to Stripe and are never sent to us or stored by us. Stripe sends you its own receipt separately from your licence email.

What we receive and keep for an order:

Your name and email address: The name is printed in the licence itself, because a licence names the person it belongs to. The email address is where the licence is sent, and it is how you recover the licence later.
The edition and the licence record: Which edition was bought, the licence identifier, the date, and whether the licence email was delivered or bounced. Delivery status is kept so that a licence which failed to arrive can be found and resent — a bounce we do not record is a customer who paid and received nothing.

We keep these for as long as the licence is valid, which for a perpetual licence means indefinitely. That is deliberate: a licence you bought years ago is one we should still be able to send you again.

Steeltype LLC is a United States company and these records are held in the United States, on Amazon Web Services. Stripe holds its own record of the payment under its own terms.

If you write to support

Everything above describes what the software and this website do on their own. Support is different, because you choose what to send us.

To diagnose a problem we may ask for a log excerpt or the contents of a status file. Those can contain drive serial numbers, volume labels, file paths and machine names — the same details the software itself never transmits. Nothing sends them for you, and you are free to redact anything before you send it. We only ever see what you paste in.

Support correspondence reaches an ordinary business mailbox rather than the systems described above, and is kept for as long as it is useful for handling your enquiry and any follow-up. If you would rather a message were deleted once a problem is resolved, say so and we will.

Licence recovery

If you ask us to send your licence again, the email address you enter is used to look up the matching purchase and send it there. The reply is the same whether or not an address matches, so this page cannot be used to find out who has bought the product.

What we do not do

We do not sell, rent, or share your information with anyone for marketing. We do not build a profile of you. We do not add you to a mailing list because you bought something. The only messages we send you are about your licence.

Getting in touch

To ask what we hold about you, to correct it, or to ask us to delete it, use the contact route on the support page. Deleting a licence record means we can no longer reissue that licence, so we will say so before doing it.

Steeltype LLC, an Indiana limited liability company, is responsible for the information described here. Last updated 16 September 2026. If this policy changes, the date changes with it. The formal privacy policy and website terms provide the full terms. Contact us if you have questions about how your information is handled.