Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cost of storing data: S3: $0.140 per GB (at the most expensive rate) vs. Google: $0.17 per GB (at their only listed rate) The rest seems to be the same though.
Fascinating, so a 1TB sata drive is $70 [1] these days and that equates to about 7 cents per GB, if you made three copies to insure your backups had a 'good' copy that would be 21 cents/gB so its cheaper than using your own hard drives. The whole 'we've decided to kill that product, you've got 30 days to get your stuff back' and the 'we lost a switch or something and we'll be back online day after tomorrow' kinds of…
Also, don't forget bandwidth charges if e.g. some of your s3 access does not come from ec2.