Cost of data backup

I compared the price of USB (universal serial bus) thumb drives, SD cards, SSD drives, hard disk drives, Bluray discs, LTO tapes as backup solutions. For media that can't be used by themselves, the price of the required drive is added once. I didn't include SD cards in the graph, because they are uncompetitive at all prices.

People are occassionally talking about data backup and the many ways of doing it, but how much does it actually cost? I used prices of products that I can actually buy right now for the comparison and checked the following options to get prices for the smallest and the largest private and small enterprise backup needs: USB (universal serial bus) thumb drives, SD cards, SSD drives (both internal and external) , internal/external hard disk drives (i.e. spinning rust) , writable/recordable Bluray discs, LTO tapes. For media that can't be used by themselves (SD cards, Bluray, tapes) , the price of the required drive is added once. For each space requirement, the graph shows the cost of the different backup options. The lines don't increase smoothly, because you can't buy half a medium. That's not very relevant for smaller media, but becomes very relevant for large media: you can't buy an LTO-8 tape with less than 12TB capacity, so if you need 14TB of space, you have to buy 2 tapes. Luckily, backup options with that issue only become price-competitive when the media granularity is already small relative to the required space. I didn't include SD cards in the graph, because they are uncompetitive at all prices.

The price of backup solutions ranges from slightly above $1000/TB to under $5/TB, but prices achievable without LTO tapes bottom out at over $30/TB and have remained at that level for many years.

The price ranges from slightly above $1000/TB to under $5/TB, but prices achievable without LTO tapes bottom out at over $30/TB and have remained at that level for many years.

Caveat: All of that assumes that your time is free of course.

I didn't take cloud solutions into account.

You can see that the price ranges from slightly above $1000/TB to under $5/TB, but the lowest price is unachievable for average Joe, because you need an LTO-9 tape drive for that. Achievable prices bottom out at over $30/TB and have remained at that level for many years.

Caveat: All of that assumes that your time is free of course, because the price covers only the media+drive. In real world usage, your time is valuable too, and that makes some affordable solutions impractical, because they are too slow. A good software can help, but simply having to switch from one medium to the next already requires your time and your attention and thus non-commercial backup solutions can hardly run unattendedly. And then there would be the time to move the backup media off-site (on-site backup does not protect against fire/theft/etc.) . Taking all of that into account would be too much for this small article, because the total cost would change based on the used software, how quickly you can acquire and switch media, how fast the data is written and how much your time is worth.

I didn't take cloud solutions into account, because you have to pay for them monthly and because they don't actually protect your data. If they fuck up, all your stuff is gone . And they do fuck up too often for someone with a high appreciation of one's data safety.

Paralinguistic/connotation key:

Mocking
Sarcasm, e.g. "Homeopathy fans are a really well-educated bunch"
Statement not to be taken literally, e.g. "There is a trillion reasons not to go there"
Non-serious/joking statement, e.g. "I'm a meat popsicle"
Personal opinion, e.g. "I think Alex Jones is an asshole"
Personal taste, e.g. "I like Star Trek"
If I remember correctly
Hypothesis/hypothetical speech, e.g. "Assuming homo oeconomicus, advertisement doesn't work"
Unsure, e.g. "The universe might be infinite"
2 or more synonyms (i.e. not alternatives), e.g. "aubergine or eggplant"
2 or more alternatives (i.e. not synonyms), e.g. "left or right"
A proper name, e.g. "Rome"

One always hopes that these wouldn't be necessary, but in the interest of avoiding ambiguity and aiding non-native English speakers, here they are. And to be clear: These are not guesses or suggestions, but rather definite statements made by the author. For example, if you think a certain expression would not usually be taken as a joke, but the author marks it as a joke, the expression shall be understood as a joke, i.e. the paralinguistic/connotation key takes precedence over the literal text. Any disagreement about the correct/incorrect usage of the expression may be ascribed to a lack of education and/or lack of tact on the part of the author if it pleases you.