That's $4 per TB-month. Meaning you're effectively paying more than the cost of a 1TB hard drive replaced every year, for every TB you're storing. Plus fees to get your data back out. An 8TB drive, replaced every year, is half the cost per TB, with no additional access cost.
Depending on how price conscious you are, I agree with the GP's "keeping it cheap is tricky". And with things like backup, even if you do it yourself, the time spent maintaining it should be negligible: Occasionally kick off a format shift or failed drive replacement, have scripts running everything else.
> Meaning you're effectively paying more than the cost of a 1TB hard drive replaced every year, for every TB you're storing.
Yes. But what you get in return is not having that data at home. It doesn't matter how many copies you have locally if your home gets robbed, flooded, or burns down.
Glacier is good for dumping data into it but it's absolutely terrible for getting your data out and for full retrievals it's also very expensive. Don't rely on it for anything other than emergency backups of your backups.
Depending on how price conscious you are, I agree with the GP's "keeping it cheap is tricky". And with things like backup, even if you do it yourself, the time spent maintaining it should be negligible: Occasionally kick off a format shift or failed drive replacement, have scripts running everything else.