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At that price, it would only take them 150 days to stop losing money if they started building some Backblaze servers (http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v...). 25,000TB / 135TB * $7,384 = $1,367,407 minimum cost of commercial hardware to store that much.

"historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that again.

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Did you read the article at all? They can't lease the equipment to anyone else, which is what's costing them money. The servers were estimated to be values at $1.25M, but they are also unable to lease all the space that they are using, which is significant.

Yes, I get that. That's why I said "stop losing money." It seems like their only solution would be to transfer the images of the data to cold storage and then find some source to recoup the cost of the cold storage devices (which is why I thought the backblaze numbers would be interesting.)

I doubt they are legally allowed to do that. Otherwise it would be a simple matter of a lot of tape drives.

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