Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They protect you from accidental deletion, malware, and even just snapshots of what something looked at a particular time etc. S3 with versioning enabled provides this. I'm not being naive when I say S3 really provides everything you might need. Its my observation over the last 13 years, dealing with tons of fires, that there has every been a situation where I couldn't retrieve something from S3. Legally you might…
And then Amazon kills your account. It doesn't matter how great their hardware and software is.
Now, one can argue that courts would take time and money and a company may not afford such risk even if it is theoretical. In this case if data is that important it is stupid to keep them at AWS.
But then just write the data to tapes and store in a bank cell or whatever.