Move your Cloud Storage data to another location

When you create a Cloud Storage bucket, you choose its permanent geographic location. As your business needs change, where you store your data might need to change too. For example, your data might be better situated in a highly available dual-region bucket, a lower cost regional bucket, or simply a different region of the world.

This tutorial helps you to select a location that best fits your needs.

Choose a new location

When you choose the location for a Cloud Storage bucket, consider the differences in availability, and price, as shown in the following table.

	Region	Dual-region	Multi-region
Availability	Data redundancy across availability zones (synchronous) RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on zonal failure (no need to change storage paths)	Higher availability than regions for a given storage class Data redundancy across regions (asynchronous) Turbo replication option for replication within 15 minutes RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on regional failure (no need to change storage paths)	Higher availability than regions for a given storage class Data redundancy across regions (asynchronous) RTO(recovery time objective)=0: automated failover and failback on regional failure (no need to change storage paths)
Pricing	Lowest storage price No replication charges No outbound data transfer charges when reading data inside the same region	Highest storage price Replication charges apply on write No outbound data transfer charges when reading data within either region	Higher storage price than regions, but lower than dual-regions Replication charges apply on write Outbound data transfer charges always apply when reading data

Location recommendations

Requirements	Recommended bucket location	Workload examples
Optimized latency and bandwidth Lowest data storage cost Cross-zone redundancy	Region^1	Analytics Backup and archive
Optimized latency and bandwidth Cross-region redundancy, with precise control of the locations where copies of data are stored	Dual-region^2	Analytics Backup and archive Disaster recovery
Cross-geography data access Cross-region redundancy	Multi-region	Content serving

1. For more information about region-specific considerations, see Geography and regions.
2. If you need a short and predictable recovery point objective (RPO), enable the premium turbo replication feature.

• To maximize performance and lower your total cost of ownership, colocate your data and compute in the same region(s). Regions and dual-regions are both suitable for this purpose.
• To avoid data replication charges, store short-lived datasets in regions.

• For moderate performance and ad hoc analytics workloads, multi-region storage can be a cost-effective choice.

  Note that the performance of workloads that use data in a multi-region bucket might vary over time because storage and compute aren't colocated. When a multi-region workload has strict performance requirements, consider enabling Anywhere Cache.

• When transferring to a new bucket, consider if the current storage class still suits your needs.

Plan and start the transfer

After you've decided on a new location, see Transfer between Cloud Storage buckets to plan and perform your data move.