It is still cheap, even when bought through a service provider, even after adding backup storage, and after adding any overhead incurred by having more data. T

It is still cheap, even when bought through a service provider, even after adding backup storage, and after adding any overhead incurred by having more data. True, it costs more than the $0.02/GB that a cheap, large spinning rust drive costs - perhaps a factor of 10 or 100 more, and perhaps billed monthly instead of as a capital expense. It's cheap in comparison to the data that a business is saving. That's really expensive data. The people that created the data cost thousands of dollars per month. It would be stupid to save $0.02 if there's even a small chance that someone will need to spend $200 to rewrite a document or reverse engineer some information that they had in an email from a couple years ago. While some data - an installer for 3rd-party software, or photos/video - is pretty large, a single config file or code file that may have been perfected over months or years is just a couple kB, and it's hard to keep the latter useful without the former. And if a customer's $100,000 installation goes down for an extended period of time because you deleted their backup images to save space? You're not getting another order like that from them.