While I'm familiar with AWS S3 from my day job, I was wondering what other alternatives are out there that may be cheaper (or even free)?
I'm also aware of dropbox, google docs, etc., but ideally I'd like to have programmatic access via an API.
Have you considered a few external hard drives? You can get a couple of terabytes for pretty cheap these days.
And IMHO Hetzner is by far the best service provider there is for bare metal and plain old VM services.
Is there anything that guarantees no data loss or zero risk ?
Generally storage isn't cheap, and cloud storage is quite expensive in the long run. If you need storage for more that a year, I would invest in own local HDDs - put to your PC or buy used NAS server or PC. You will benefit with much better performance and this would be the most cost effective solution.
Keep in mind that often transfer to cheap cloud storage is slow, I tried to keep my backup in few different providers, it could take literally months to upload 6TB of data. Also keep in mind that you may be charged for data transfer separately, for every data access, so cloud cost may be much higher than expected.
If you plan use this in shorter periods, I would go with OVH offer - they probably have best quality/cost ratio. Depending on your needs I would suggest buying dedicated storage server, or use their Data Storage (3x replicated $0.0112/month/GB, plus outgoing transfer - $0.011/GB). They also have cold storage for about $0.0023/month/GB.
I currently use it as my personal cloud backup
I prefer Wasabi for my personal because I can use my own backup/encryption scripts (using rclone) instead of closed source service like CrashPlan.
https://www.headlinesoftoday.com/technology/tech-reviews/goo...
At the low end, OVH has a 4×4TB HDD SATA + 1×500GB SSD NVMe server for ~$90/month.
Of course, you have to configure and administer it, so not for everyone.
Disclaimer: I have never used Hetzner's services nor can I vouch for them.
S3 is not a single host solution and will neither get unavailable nor will lose data if one particular host (or even the datacenter it is in) becomes unavailable. If you don’t need those properties then building your own hosts might be cheaper.
S3 compatible and comes with free bandwidth
If you're willing to tolerate hr+ delays in accessing your data aws glacier deep archive is 70cents per terabyte month.
that's pretty awesome in my book.
If you need to access the data in under an hr it comes out around $2 per TB/mo
note they've recently reduced their pricing so you might be looking at old marketing. But my latest bill charged me 0.0007
you're right of course that retrieval in an out is much more expensive and so prob not a great fit for your usecase
Is there an easy way for a consumer to use this for backup?
There are a couple of Python libraries out there for posting and fetching, but it'll definitely be shabbier than a purpose-built service. However, for seriously large storage requirements, you can't beat that price.
I have a full PC backup I did 5 years ago drifting around on Usenet somewhere. It was still there when I checked a year ago.
[1]https://newsgroupdirect.com/member/billing/?planid=189&deal= but I've had problems with their service, and personally use FrugalUsenet for a little more.
