Most of the costs aren't from storage space, but compute power. We aren't talking about duplicating the whole infrastructure, just backing up the data. Disk space is dirt cheap.
Also, by "two places" I meant the live DB and one backup that's somewhere completely different. My wording may have been confusing.
They did have backups. Thats why I asumed you meant double backups. If you do cold storage you should have 3 copies due to possible corruptions. Sure tape drives are cheap but someone also have to run and check the backups.
Also, by "two places" I meant the live DB and one backup that's somewhere completely different. My wording may have been confusing.