It let’s you choose your storage directory and upload/download to and from it over the internet. That’s it!

VPN + network share…?

Right now I’m thinking $9.99 for a LIFETIME purchase DRM FREE. Is that reasonable?

From the single sentence explaining what it does, absolutely not. I can choose a directory and share it within 10 minutes.

Alternatively I was wondering if maybe instead I should try to sell cloud storage itself?

You aren’t the first person to come up with this idea, nor will you be the last.

a way to finance getting deeper into it

Better finance some lawyers first. What are you going to do as soon as you get a DMCA notice? Or if one of your tenants store something super illegal? Lmao

Indexing?

Go back to our old system of duplicated external drives, with one living offsite.

That would be the cheapest method I suppose

assuming we’d get maybe 30TB per tape on the 18TB raw LTO 9 tapes

LOL. No. You’re going to get 18TB per tape. If anything you’re probably going to get less

Would then need to spend $5000-10000AUD on the actual hardware on top of the drives

You don’t have to(?). You’re only going to be servicing at 1Gbps at a time. Interface limitations aside, even a $30 raspberry pi can do that.

LTTs set up is different because they have high speed networking, multiple users requesting a ton of data all at the same time, and ZFS dedupe going on. You don’t.

This solution we could potentially not duplicate the data to external drives though and live with RAID as only form of redundancy…

Not sure what this means

Another clour storage service?

S3 glacier is potentially a solution, provided you (or someone at work) is willing to put in the time and effort to read the fine print. I have a post here on the subreddit if you want a somewhat summarized version.

Even shorter version : 300TB = USD $300 per month. Every single terabyte you want to get back is $100 on top of that. Do the math on how much egress you need.

Oh, and again, don’t forget to read the fine print. Because you WILL get screwed over if you try to use it as a drop in replacement for google drive.

Paperbak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory

Yes

Oh that’s interesting and might be an issue with the OP’s 50 year time line

This is not a question about how long data I put on the SSD’s will last.

Counterargument, you actually ARE. For example, the firmware is also stored on flash (albeit it’s NOR instead of NAND as far as I know).

I have absolutely no clue how long NOR flash lasts, although I have heard anecdotally that it is much more reliable (and more expensive) than NAND. Hence why SSDs use NAND for mass storage, and use NOR for shit like firmware.

Is there any reason they won’t work after that amount of time?

Without that firmware it’s not gonna do a whole lot lol. So I don’t have an answer to your question, but I feel like it should also be considered.