20 TB isn't that out of reach when you're running your media server and taking high resolution photos or video (modern cameras push a LOT of bits).

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.

> knowledge that the data will definitely be there is way more important than having "free" access to a large pool of bytes

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

20TB isn't all that much anymore, especially if you do anything like filming, streaming, photography, etc. Even a handful of HQ TV shows can reach several TB rather quickly.

>This is the same product.

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.

> Just because we can shove 20TB of data into a cute little nas does not mean we should.

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.

I currently store 10 TB on my NAS, and growing. The data is live, I access some of it every day, sometimes remotely. I have 3 rotating "independent" backups in addition to the NAS (by independent I mean they're made with rsync and don't depend on any specific NAS OS feature), stored in an old safe that would probably not be very effective against thieves but should protect the drives in case of fire.

There are no recurring costs to this setup except electricity. I don't think S3 can beat that.

hardly 1%, i’m sure anyone that works in the film industry or media in general has terabytes of video footage. Maybe even professional photographers who have many clients.

20TB is a single drive