The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/gopher962 on 2024-12-23 00:06:43.

Hey all,

Maybe a dumb question but I can’t stop wondering why there isn’t a cheap alternative to AWS Glacier Deep Archive. Please don’t say “buy your own disk” as I am talking about businesses who aren’t interested in having a physical disk in an office or maintaining it, yet still having to park large amounts of data for long periods of time.

For example, I know that many companies store data in Glacier only because of legal reasons and don’t really access this data at all. It’s typically only there and stored, if ever one day authorities request access. For example, logs related to PCI and HIPAA fall into this category. Or any other auditing logs, or legacy assets of companies.

The Glacier Deep Archive service costs around 1$ per TB (depending on the region), excluding the data transfer costs. If I store 16 TB there, it will be 16$ per month = and 192$/year (+tax and data transfer).

For 240$, which is almost the yearly cost of storing this data, I can easily buy a 16TB disk.

Just imagine buying two of these disks, and placing them in two different geographical locations for redundancy reasons. Whenever a disk gets full, it can also be powered off to save electricity cost as the service won’t promise rapid retrival of data. If a customer needs to retrieve data, it can be powered on again in 12 hours for example.

The profit marging of such service seems potentially quite high to me.

But what am I missing? :)

Thanks