With respect to pure speed, at some point it would be cheaper/faster to show up at the facility with a trunk load of drives and plug right in. Superficially, t

With respect to pure speed, at some point it would be cheaper/faster to show up at the facility with a trunk load of drives and plug right in. Superficially, this is a game for the locals, not someone like me. Then again, looking at how little it costs to ship me a couple terrabytes of drives, maybe this isn't as crazy as it sounds. I can get a cheap empty prosumer NAS box for a couple hundred bucks and a couple TB of drives for a couple hundred more. If I gave someone (presumably the internet archive) a kilobuck and told them to keep the change (which would be a small but nice revenue stream for them), they could assemble a couple TB nas and ship it to me and I could plug it in and give it a public ipv6 address and aside from the kilobuck it would cost me a couple hundred bucks a year in electricity and presumably bandwidth, but at least it wouldn't have any labor cost. This might be going a bit far for individual citizens but you could probably guilt trip corporations into hosting your custom made NAS boxes for you. Just an idea to think about. Another intriguing financial model might be to partner with public libraries and schools and double charge private companies in order to give public libraries and schools free backup NAS. The world of non-profits opens up strange new ideas.