We’re diving deep into a fascinating case study: what does it actually cost to pull 10 petabytes of data out of AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure and land it in a tape-backed object store that you own and operate? Cloud vendors love to tell us that cold storage is dirt cheap, but Carl’s analysis reveals a very different story when you factor in the hidden costs—retrieval fees, egress charges, and that monthly rent you’re paying forever.

In this conversation, we break down the total cost of ownership over 5, 10, and 20-year horizons. We compare the major cloud cold storage tiers against a realistic on-premises tape library with disk cache, proper refresh cycles, and operational costs included. We also tackle the practical questions: When does repatriation actually make sense? What’s the break-even point? How do you handle rehydration? And what about that egress fee—the half-million-dollar bill just to get your own data back?