> Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. If you have 5TB of photos, chances are you're not looking through 5TB of photos all that o

> Putting 4 TB in S3 costs US$94.21/month before any transfer costs. If you have 5TB of photos, chances are you're not looking through 5TB of photos all that often, and S3's IA storage is very appealing at ~$65/mo. If you only want a cold storage backup, glacier will keep them for you at $20/mo. If you need storage that's only accessed once or twice a year (and you don't mind waiting a bit to get your file) you can pay less than $5/mo with Glacier Deep Archive. The cost of S3 that you quoted is for _nine nines_ of durability and milliseconds latency. If you don't need that, you can pay for far cheaper storage that better-matches your needs, with the convenience of never needing to buy/transfer/replace/sell drives. > That doesn’t include power costs, but over a year you get $990 to spend on that and other things from the cost difference vs. S3 If you spend ~days each year worrying about storage and paying for ever-larger disks (and spending time selling your old ones, for whatever you can get), chances are the few hundred dollars you might come out ahead doing it yourself isn't really worth it.