Meta, Response to sub-comments[meta enough yet?]: Ah, that makes way more sense. Sorry for labelling the parent a troll. This was clearly my mistaken interpretation. It was weird. As I tried to check out the math on the parent's assertions, they came out an order of magnitude too high like 3 times in a row. So I concluded that the parent was intentionally inflating the relevant costs to misdirect the discussion. However, it was really just my failure to consider the perspective of the parent, aligned with a loose enough situation that the mistake was possible. Again, I apologize for the misapplied label. I'll leave the original comment below so as not to rewrite history on how I was (due to sincere misunderstanding, I maintain) kind of a jerk :/

A couple grand? 500GB hdds have been less than $100 for a long time now, certainly since before Amazon Glacier was a product.

Just because you can formulate a large valuation for something doesn't mean that it's a reasonable valuation.

Even $10/cd is a ridiculous estimate of the cost of blank CDs. If you insisted on using blank CDs for backup, you could do 200 CDs for $40.

Edit: And what are CDs... 640mb? that's like 12 CDs, not 200... I'm realizing that I've fallen into a troll trap...

Meta: I guess I'll leave this comment up as a cautionary tale.