Move your Cloud Storage data to another location

Last reviewed 2022-06-20 UTC

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.

Objectives

  • Choose a new location for the Cloud Storage data.

Costs

In this document, you use the following billable components of Google Cloud:

To generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage, use the pricing calculator.

New Google Cloud users might be eligible for a free trial.

Before you begin

There are no prerequisites to this tutorial.

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.

Zone Region Dual-region Multi-region
Availability
  • Data redundancy within one availability zone
  • Zonal outages might affect 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
  • Offers the highest performance in Cloud Storage for demanding workloads at the highest storage price, out of all location types
  • Zonal bucket-specific data transfer charges apply. For more information, see Cloud Storage 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
  • Ultra-low latency
  • Ultra-high bandwidth and I/O
  • High performance
 Zone1
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
  • High-performance computing
  • Data-intensive analytics
  • Optimized latency and bandwidth
  • Lowest data storage cost
  • Cross-zone redundancy
 Region2
  • Analytics
  • Backup and archive
  • Optimized latency and bandwidth
  • Cross-region redundancy, with precise control of the locations where copies of data are stored
 Dual-region3
  • Analytics
  • Backup and archive
  • Disaster recovery
  • Cross-geography data access
  • Cross-region redundancy
 Multi-region
  • Content serving
  1. Zonal locations for buckets are only available through Rapid Bucket.
  2. For more information about region-specific considerations, see Geography and regions.
  3. If you need a short and predictable recovery point objective (RPO), enable the premium turbo replication feature.
  • To maximize performance and lower the latency between requests and responses, colocate your stored data in the same zone as the compute resources accessing your data. To store data in zones, use Rapid Bucket.
  • To withstand the risk of losing data within an individual zone, use regions or dual-regions.
  • 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.