I'm curious: how much does this 50TB cost per year, how much would it cost to upload it (the initial backup), and how much would it cost to download it (in case of 2x disasters). Also genuinely curious, why do you need a 3rd copy if you have a 2nd copy off-site? 50TB isn't a lot, but I'm always interested about others' perceptions of the value of data and the need to have multiple copies of it.
Tape drive replacement. It's 8 years old and we're out of tapes. Plus, tapes have a shelf life so it's at the point of getting expensive.
The second offsite storage we have will only replicate the main backup san, so no real long term archiving solution.
Having Azure blob storage also means a much quicker route to backing up onedrive/o365/mailboxes/teams/sharepoint etc etc as we'll stick a backup node in azure as a VM for that.
The costs I'm getting are that we have to pay for a block of credit (£900) to use within a 12 month cycle. If we go under, we lose it, over it and we are billed monthly. The costs IIRC, were something like £480 for the 50TB and no cost for uploading.
Downloading was around £900, but I calculated that using the archive tier and have decided on cold instead.
for that kinda money, it's a no brainer.
Over time the data will grow obviously to a point before we hit retention and recycle it but I'm keen to go this route. I know our tape library cost us a small fortune....and we only have the one at a single site (another failure point).