Dewars
Dewar → cane → box → vial position
Freezers, refrigerators and cold rooms
Know what is in every freezer, refrigerator and cold room.
Cold Storage covers laboratory refrigerators, −20 °C and −80 °C freezers, and cold rooms. It is part of the same free, offline app as liquid-nitrogen cell storage, with its own cabinets, items and history.
The sample lab has four cabinets to try: an upright and a chest freezer, a fridge and a cold room part way through its clean-out.
One local CryoIndex database
Cabinets
Cabinet → shelf or area → racks and boxes → item
One app, two storage sides
Each side is built for what it holds.
A vial taken from liquid nitrogen usually leaves for good. A tube from a freezer may go to the bench and come back many times. So Cold Storage has its own screens, its own checks and its own history next to liquid-nitrogen cell storage, and the app opens on a Home that shows both.
A layout that matches the cabinet
Start from stacked shelves, drawers, shelves plus door, floor spaces under hanging baskets, shelving units along a cold room’s walls, or rows and columns of your own. Then open any area to add racks, boxes and positions, up to four levels deep and grids up to 32 by 32. A simple refrigerator can stay simple.
Materials, lots and items
CryoIndex keeps three things apart: what a material is, the lot or preparation it came from, and each item you can pick up. Shared details are entered once, and every item keeps its own place and history. Expiry is set by lot and can be set for a single item. Extra columns from your spreadsheet come in with the import and show on each item.
Store, find and take out
Store items into the first free positions or the ones you choose. Search storage shows the cabinet, the shelf or rack, the box and the position before the door opens. Take out moves an item to the bench with its position kept; Return to storage puts it back, or somewhere new.
Amounts and freeze-thaw
Record how much is left as it is used, measured or estimated, and correct the amount when you check it. Count confirmed freeze-thaw cycles, with uncertain ones counted separately. Mark an item as finished when it is used up or discarded, and find it again under Finished items.
Check a cabinet
Walk one box, one shelf or a whole freezer and record what you find. An item that is not there is marked missing and waits in Items to locate until it is found or you record what happened. Items with an incomplete location, such as a cabinet but no position, are listed there too.
Defrost and clean-out
Set when each freezer is defrosted and each refrigerator or cold room cleaned out, with a reminder before it is due. When the day comes, take a snapshot and its manifest, a PDF and a CSV, plus a work packet for each person responsible. Then walk the return by place or by person, and record what you find with answers such as “Back where it was”, “Back, with everything on it” and “Not there”.
Departure review
When a lab member leaves, bring together the Cold Storage items and containers that lab member is responsible for, on a worksheet in walking order. Decide one item or several: keep with that lab member for now, transfer, discard, mark as finished, or mark missing. Review the changes, apply them, and keep a summary the lab can print.
Spreadsheets in, reports out
Import a CSV made from the blank or example template. Every row is shown, and you choose each place before anything is written; CryoIndex never guesses one. It is built for sheets of up to 5,000 rows; a larger one still imports, more slowly, with a notice. Export the whole inventory as a CSV, or make the Cold Storage inventory report, a PDF and a CSV with the same report ID.
Activity, links and backups
Cold Storage keeps its own activity: who stored, took out, returned, used or checked what, and when. An item can record what it was made from, including a cell vial on the liquid-nitrogen side. One backup holds the whole lab, and a restore can replace all of it, the liquid-nitrogen cells only, or Cold Storage only.
What Cold Storage does not claim
Practical inventory, with its limits said plainly.
Cold Storage holds the records your lab enters. It does not monitor freezer temperatures, place orders or handle HR offboarding.
- No cloud synchronization or shared server database
- No temperature-probe or alarm-system integration
- No purchasing, ELN, chemical-safety or general asset management
- No clinical, diagnostic, GLP, GMP, ISO, FDA or Part 11 claim
- A departure review records the lab’s decisions; it does not certify offboarding
Tell us how it goes
A blank or redacted sheet is all we need.
If you cannot set up a cabinet to match the real one, or an import will not read your lab's sheet, the most useful evidence is a blank or redacted spreadsheet, its column headings, a sketch of the cabinet, or five to ten fictional rows that keep the way places and materials are organized.
Share a sanitized exampleWhat helps most
- Does the cabinet use compartments, shelves, racks, or areas on a floor?
- Does the sheet tell a material, its lot and each item apart?
- Do items return after use, and is their former position kept?
- Are remaining amounts or freeze-thaw cycles actually recorded?
- How many rows does the lab’s sheet hold?
Please do not send live inventories, patient identifiers, unpublished sample names or proprietary construct information.
Both sides, free
Cells in liquid nitrogen and everything else your lab keeps cold.
CryoIndex includes several dewars, cell lineage, box and cabinet checks, five reports, CSV import and checked backups, with nothing to buy.