Archive trustee
The digital memory of entities that close
Archivum takes over the digital assets of entities winding up — files, website, email — keeps them under contract for a defined period, and arbitrates at term between extension, deletion and transfer of rights. French sovereignty, GDPR compliance, final decision by named successors.
What this is about
When a company winds up — voluntary cessation, amicable liquidation or court liquidation — its digital assets fall into a grey zone. The website disappears at domain expiry. The contact mailbox no longer reaches anyone. Accounting records, customer contracts, deliverables, professional email stay scattered on SaaS accounts and personal drives that nobody maintains. Yet legal obligations — ten-year accounting retention, HR archives, residual contracts — keep running long after registry removal.
Archivum does the work for you. We take over the migration, conservation and final arbitration of the digital assets of the closed entity, in a clear contractual frame: who can consult what, under which rule, and who decides at term. We are not a generic storage service. We are an archive trustee — an old trade transposed to digital.
Three service lines
Archivum covers three very precise perimeters. Each can be taken alone or combined in the same contract.
- Documentary archiving. Encrypted preservation of files, projects, databases, media, application logs and email. Indexing by folder, contributor and date. Cryptographic fingerprint per item. Storage in France on Scaleway infrastructure. Named access grants, logged consultation register. See the documentary archive deposit.
- Website continuity. Migration of the existing site to static HTML: pages, articles, media, canonical URLs preserved to keep accumulated SEO. Clean disabling of active features (forms, accounts, carts). Sovereign Scaleway hosting behind Cloudflare. Domain name kept under contract. See the site migration.
- Inbound-only email continuity. Critical mailboxes (contact@, support@, accounting@) are taken over inbound-only. No outgoing mail is possible — essential protection against address impersonation after registry removal. Incoming mail is preserved and indexed. See the email takeover.
Who this service is for
Archivum is intentionally narrow. Our target is not the general public, nor active companies looking for backup, nor regulated archive-trustee operations (NF Z42-013, qualified eIDAS, regulated evidential vault). We hold none of those qualifications.
- Winding-up entities — SAS, SARL, SCI, 1901-Act non-profits, sole traders — preparing the end of activity and wanting to organise the preservation of their digital heritage.
- Amicable liquidators and court-appointed administrators — looking for a clean solution to preserve the history of a closed entity beyond the procedure.
- Former directors, partners, successors — wanting to keep access to sensitive documents after the entity is gone, in a collegial vote framework when several decision-makers are involved.
Use cases
Ten stories cover the spectrum of situations we handle. Here are three representative ones — the full list lives on the Who is it for page.
SAS in voluntary cessation
Your shareholders decide to wind down a SAS with no buyer. How Archivum takes over deliverables, the website and incoming mail for successors.
Freelancer winding up
Ten years of solo practice, one hundred and twenty clients, accounting obligations still running for another decade.
Association that dissolves
Fifteen years, two hundred members, event archives and an editorial site that count for collective memory.
Sovereignty and legal framework
All customer data — documentary archives, continuity sites, preserved mail — is stored in metropolitan France on Scaleway infrastructure (S3-compatible object storage, French data centres). For public-facing delivery of continuity sites, Cloudflare is used as a frontal CDN with no primary storage. No customer data leaves the EU, ever.
The legal framework is strictly the GDPR and French general contract law. Archivum is not NF Z42-013-certified, not a qualified eIDAS provider, and not a regulated evidential vault operator. Our contract is a bilateral enforceable convention, signed in your name and Archivum's. See European digital sovereignty and GDPR after cessation.
End-of-period arbitration — the difference
An Archivum archiving agreement is never eternal by default. At the end of each period — typically five or ten years — the named successors decide collegially between three options:
Extension
A new period, same signatories or updated list. For archives of historical or patrimonial value.
Secure deletion
Physical and logical destruction with an enforceable certificate addressed to the successors. Sound choice when the stratum no longer carries legal value.
Transfer to the trustee
Archivum inherits contractually the domain, content or archives, releasing successors from future charges.
That is what sets Archivum apart from a mere storage service: the final decision belongs to designated people, never to the provider. See end-of-period arbitration.
How much it costs
Pricing depends on five parameters: your website, your archives, your customer data, your mailboxes, and the number of named successors in the contract — all projected on the retention duration. The estimator on the Pricing page gives an order of magnitude in a few clicks. The actual price is set in the quote, after the free initial scoping.
Scope your case in one hour
Whatever stage you are at in the procedure — planned cessation, ongoing liquidation, succession to organise — the right entry point is initial scoping. One hour by video, a written memo within two to five working days, two or three priced scenarios. No commitment.