I have a fairly optimized backup to glacier strategy involving a couple of days of soak time in S3 before moving to glacier with lifecycle rules to avoid the 180 day min storage for transient files. Net I end up paying about $1.20 to $1.50 per TB per month. Restoration of my data set would cost around $100/TB though. So a straight $1/TB would be a nice savings on a good month, and a great savings if my house ever burns down and I need to restore.

Backblaze is 6$/TB/month with no egress fee, and are a well established company with a good reputation:

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

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

It doesn’t? From my experience it comes up every time S3 is mentioned, except maybe recently Cloudflare took the spotlight.

No egress fees make a huge cost difference if you ever need your archived data back.

That has retrieval fees as well as minimum storage times.

Did it ever get revealed how glacier works? I had heard they were using DVD-Rs back in the day, but that was a decade ago and a big price drop.

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.

I dont believe aws have ever said.

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.