Comment by usr1106
Technically I have no big doubts about S3 Glacier.
But what happens if you don't use that stuff for a long time. You are in hospital when the bill needs to get paid. Your credit card gets stolen and the number needs to changed. Whatever personal crisis that you are not able to take care of life as usual for some weeks. They will just delete your data before you are back in business.
Does anyone know how long it takes, how many warning mails will come? I have very little data in AWS, but I more or less constantly feeling it might happen to me. Maybe not because of such big crisis, but just the simple fact that my bank will reject the automatic payment requiring a PSD2 second factor and I miss the email...
It takes a couple of months for an unpaid AWS account to get it suspended. Then you have 30 days to reactivate it. Then you have 90 days before the data are actually wiped from the Glacier. You have half a year, or maybe more, to get your backup data.
The price of Glacier Deep Archive is roughly $1/mo per terabyte. (I struggled to produce 500 GB of photos in 15 years.) Set up a dedicated AWS account, put $50 on it, set up a yearly auto-payment of $10, and you're likely safe for several years of nonpayment.
Retrieval is not free though, something like $20-40 for retrieval from tape, and about $90 for a terabyte of egress traffic. Okay for the rare occasion of a full restore.
Backblaze B2 is $6/mo per terabyte, and they only give you 44 days of grace period before deletion for nonpayment. But the traffic is free either way, up to 3x the amount stored per month. They are good for frequent full backups, and for doing full restores periodically.