Ask HN: Is AWS bandwidth pricing making backup storage infeasible?
Some background: I was considering using S3 Glacier Deep Archive as a solution to backing up large volumes of media files (mostly raw video/audio). For production/editing these files are kept on fast SSD based storage, but after that they're archived together with all the project files, notes etc. It's done on normal 4TB sized spinning disks and they're read maybe once a year when archive footage is needed for a new edit.
When expanding storage there was a discussion on whether backing up to AWS would be better than buying twice the amount of disks to do RAID 1. The initial idea was that non-RAID disks + AWS is better, because it's off-site for when the building burns down, and you can make make the permissions "append only" so it's much more resistant to ransomware or other issues.
The price of S3 Glacier Deep Archive is great at $ 0.00099 per GB per month, that's about two years of storing 4 TB at the price of a 4 TB drive. The much feared retrieval fees in case one of our local drives is lost (crashes/corruption happen) is $ 0.003 per GB so $ 12 to get everything back. So the fear of retrieval fees actually isn't bad at all with the S3 Glacier Deep Archive pricing if you accept having to wait 48 hours.
But then comes the shocker: You're going to pay 30 times as much as the retrieval fee to get that data out of AWS, because bandwidth is $ 0.09 per GB, so retrieving that "crashed disk" 4TB will cost $ 372 in total instead of just $ 12. Did I miss something? Or does AWS bandwidth pricing make using them as a backup a terrible idea if you ever want to be able to retrieve that backup?