[anoneng]

Much like many cameras process and discard the RAW sensor data after processing to pixel data if not further compressing and discarding the processed pixel data to a lossy image format, even more so the raw BAM sequencing read data is vastly larger than processed VCF files. Even many companies that retain that data are liable to archive it offline rather than keep the raw reads permanently accessible online. There are real costs involved and a business case is needed for keeping that data. Especially with a decent privacy policy or regulations storing 100G or multiples of that online for free and downloading on demand is a significant compared to the entire cost of sequencing.