This is not the perspective of actors working on longer timescale. For a number is agencies, preserving some encrypted data is beneficial, because it will be possible to recover in N years, whether any classic improvements, bugs found in key generators, or advances in quantum.
Very few people here will be that interesting, but... worth keeping in mind.
20TB which u can keep in a 2-bay cute little nas will cost you $4k USD / year on S3 infrequent access tier in APAC (where I am). So "payback time" of local hardware is just 6 months vs S3 IA. That's before you pay for any data transfers.
For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.
This is the same product.
> 20TB
I think we might be pushing the 1% case here.
Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.
For me, knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes.
I'm the last person I know who buys DVDs, and they're 2/3s of the reason I need more space. The last third is photography. 45.7 megapixels x 20 FPS adds up quick.
S3's cost is extreme when you're talking in the tens of terabytes range. I don't have the upstream to seed the backup, and if I'm going outside of my internal network it's too slow to use as primary storage. Just the NAS on gigabit ethernet is barely adequate to the task.
Until Amazon inexplicably deletes your AWS account because your Amazon.com account had an expired credit card and was trying and failing to renew a subscription.
Ask me how I know
Confusingly "Glacier" is both its own product, which stores data in "vaults", and a family of storage tiers on Amazon S3, which stores data in "buckets". I think Glacier the product is deprecated though, since accessing the Glacier dashboard immediately recommends using Glacier the S3 storage tiers instead.
There are no recurring costs to this setup except electricity. I don't think S3 can beat that.
Okay, I'm curious now. When you were talking about "a bunch of local disks", what size disk did you have in mind?
Right now the best price per TB is found on disks in the 14-24TB range.
Bandwidth to get all of that back down to your system is much pricier, depending on how much you use that data.
You can’t be serious.
I don't need 100% of my bytes to be instantly available to me on my network. The most important stuff is already available. I can wait a day for arbitrary media to thaw out for use. Local caching and pre-loading of read-only blobs is an extremely obvious path for smoothing over remote storage.
Other advantages should be obvious. There are no limits to the scale of storage and unless you are a top 1% hoarder, the cost will almost certainly be more than amortized by the capex you would have otherwise spent on all that hardware.