https://blog.catbox.moe/post/821058172332769280/removing-idle-uploads

I am going to keep this update short, but try to justify/give as much background as I can. Beginning July 6th, 2026 and applying retroactively, files uploaded anonymously that have not had a download/hit in over 2 years will be removed from Catbox.

Catbox has been running for a little over 11 years now, and as such has accumulated what I can only call cruft. Prior to the introduction of Litterbox (and even still to this day really), many people use Catbox as a dumping ground for their script outputs, junk data shares, etc, without considering that this is a free/community funded service. This has lead to an intense amount of data (currently 66 TB) that has not been accessed in over a year, potentially more. Normally the ebb and flow of Lain would keep the idle/active files balanced, with increasing usage, and the exponential increased cost of hard drives due to AI datacenter expansion, I’m forced between a rock and a hard place: put thousands of dollars of my personal money towards additional storage space, or begin culling. And if you think the “thousands of dollars” is an exaggeration, below is the standard hard drive I purchased September 2025 for Catbox servers:

And, since I would really not like data loss, I purchase 2 of these drives for parity. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I don’t have $1,968 to drop every 3 months (about how long it takes Catbox to fill up 20 TB)! Before the prices for everything sky rocketed, I could handle $800~ every 3 months. Before you say something, yes, I have looked at the refurbished market as well - their prices are similarly dismal.

So, now that the justification is out of the way, I’m sure there will be some blowback for this, as I’ve always positioned Catbox as “a filehost that keeps your files until the heat death of the universe”. Perhaps that was my teenage nativity. For reading this far though, you get the special info: the files that are removed will be going to single-layer (non redunant) storage. They will no longer be accessible on files.catbox.moe. If there is a file that you found on a forum post from years ago that has been culled, feel free to email me, and I can pull the file back into the fold.

It sucks that it’s come to this, but with the ouroboros of money that’s happening in the AI bubble, we can only hope for a very sharp needle to blow it up.