Retention Half-Life

Retention Half-Life is the point at which a stored client file stops being worth its carrying cost. Every agency accumulates signed contracts, brand assets, and compliance deliverables, and each file has a retrieval probability that decays over time while its storage and access cost stays flat or rises. The framework asks one question per document class: how long until the odds of needing this file again drop below the cost of keeping it instantly available? Cold storage is cheap but slow, and a client audit request that takes 48 hours to fulfill damages a retainer more than the storage savings recover. pCloud's lifetime purchase plans change the math by converting recurring storage cost into a one-time payment, which shifts the break-even point for long-horizon archives. DocHub's Google Workspace integration keeps active project files inside the tools teams already open, so retrieval friction stays near zero for the documents that still matter.