I'm not sure printing data is as cheep as you think it is. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation: From [1] I got an upper bound of 1,800 DPI in printer

I'm not sure printing data is as cheep as you think it is. I did a quick back of the envelope calculation: From [1] I got an upper bound of 1,800 DPI in printers From [2] I got that ink costs 0.0062 $/in^2 Using those numbers, the cost of ink comes out to be about $5.83 per megabyte. On the other hand, a quick Google search for "hard drive" got a sponsored result for $80 1-terabyte drive from Newegg, comming out to $0.0000762 per megabyte.