> If one of these guys is using tape
no one with half a brain cell uses tape for cloud purposes.
> surely any reasonable sized user is encrypting everything they put there, aren't they?
baw haw ha ha ha! oh my. ha ha hahahahha
> Or in other words, you can buy two drives a year for the price of same amount of Galcier storage!
But you're forgetting that Glacier/Google are using erasure coding. So to do an equivalent you need at least a Raid6 but more like a zVol with 5 parity disks, active scrubbing and integrity checks. So let's say you have to build a ZFS server with enough disks and power it up every month and run a full check of all files each time.
No, Glacier et. al. are not cheap. But it's probably cheaper than you doing it yourself or if not that, at least better done than what your average joe could hope to do.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
