On the other hand the data would be much more reliable in that scenario. A 10 GB consumer hard drive is likely to fail or at least corrupt some data at some point, and if you’re going to go with multiple redundancies then your cost goes up.

But yeah, it’s all kind of moot. I had AWS suspend my account once because someone complained they found a copyrighted image on one of my servers. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t really control it.

You can buy "datacenter-grade" drives from WD on their website, which are presumably of higher quality.

Either way, though, this is going to cost five figures, annually, to store in S3. For half of one year of S3 you can have a fairly robust RAID setup, maybe replace 1 drive every two years, and enjoy the data any time you want it without fees-as-a-service.

High five for avoiding AWS!

> I had AWS suspend my account once because someone complained they found a copyrighted image on one of my servers. If it’s in the cloud, you don’t really control it.

Considering the material here, that's more likely to happen than not. So, unlikely to be "much more reliable" for this particular scenario. ;)

Half that if you use Infrequent Access, reduce it more if you do something sensible with Glacier policies - it is an archive after all.

You'd need to consider method costs, egress, etc on top of all that, to be fair

Plus ~$7k to transfer it outside of AWS