Start by not using an unknown provider with questionable reliability or stability where the only contact is an email address.

Eg if your service vendor costs you 1000/month and they have a 10-day outage and you lose 10000000, they will credit you 1000 best-case, or maybe 1/3 of that (since it was up most of the month).

Umm, most providers' standard T&Cs exclude liability for indirect or consequential loss following unavailability of their service.

https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

I'm surprised the don't come up more in a discussion about backup storage.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

I know the link is LTO based for some of it. Is LTO really cheaper than hard drives? Or is it just that LTO has automation equipment behind it?

It's interesting to me that hard drives have dropped 56% in cost since 2017, and yet I don't think storage prices have dropped anything like that. Per the article, it's because demand allows them to keep it high.

I welcome a price war! And thanks for the honesty Backblaze.

My long held suspicion is they designed the product slos/apis to allow for the underlying storage technology to change without customers being aware, hence its clearly inspired by tape access patterns.

Possibly some of the very largest aws regions use tape libraries.

But I suspect aws co-mingles the data with S3 and just wears the cost. They've been known to price below cost (eg lambda implementation before firecracker) to corner the market.